Keeping up to date with your workwear needs
April 1st 2004 Johnsons Apparelmaster, UK-based workwear and hygiene services provider and part of the Johnson Services Group, has launched a customer care extranet giving customers, partners and suppliers online access to secure business information.
Johnsons is a 200 year old business that has 40 000 customers and delivers one million garments per week. The extranet is the result of asking customers what they could do to improve the service. Cleaning Matters spoke to Mark Cosh, sales director of Johnsons Apparelmaster to find out what difference the extranet would make to you, the customer. Workwear is a necessary part of many cleaning companies overheads, for protection, saving your clothes getting dirty, visibility and protection and also corporate identity. One of the thing that kept on coming up from a customer survey we conducted was request for information. Many of these were simple things such as a list of the wearers that they had at their site, when to change the workwear and so on, said Mark. What they wanted, though, was self-service, so that they could ask and get answers for questions themselves. This is more important than satisfying a certain logistical queries, there is the need to meet health and safety regulations there has to evidence of garment cleansing.
Before the introduction of the extranet there were fifteen individual sites each with its own database. If a customer wanted an overview of the service provided to them, all fifteen databases were required to produce a report. The IT team was constantly writing reports for customers and by the time it reached them it was out of date. All of the fifteen sites had an administration team producing reports, so now that this is automatic it frees up a lot of time. This allow Johnsons to be proactive with customer information rather than merely reacting to requests. An example of such situation is the ability to send emails or put onto the extranet information such as changes in health & safety legislation or new equipment ranges. From the point of view of the customer the ability to gain information at any time allows for better budgeting and planning and also reacting quickly to new situation such as in increase in staff for the Christmas rush. Mark comments that it has changed the relationship between supplier and customer; Rather than the customer coming to us with a problem, we now have a more positive relationship. If someone working at a particular establishment were to take home their workwear and wash it themselves this would be noticed by Johnsons and managers could be informed that they were breaking health & safety regulations.
The system was a package from Business Objectives and implemented within 6 weeks into a centralised working system. As explained information can go both ways in that it can be extracted by the customer to see the current status of its service agreement such as number of wearers and the frequency of washing and also by Johnsons to aid the management process. If 1000 garments are laundered from a customer every day and only 900 are received on one particular day Johnsons can alert the customer. They may have a reason for this anomaly or 100 may be missing and the next day they would be short. With the new extranet we will be able to minimise disruption on the shopfloor. We are not doing anything different than we did before but we are doing it more efficiently and being proactive, concluded Mark. More articles from Johnsons Apparelmaster: | 
