Under the Big Top     

Trust that 2010 is off to a great start and for many of you in the tent and party rental business, it’s time to prepare your operations for the big push with peak season just around the corner.

A major consideration for most tent rental operators is maintaining an inventory of clean and quality grade tops to serve the needs of your growing customer base.  We just added a new white paper to our library now available at our website.  If you’d like to read about some of the best practices in both the manual and mechanized approach to tent washing, you’re invited to download our white paper entitled “Improving Tent Washing Efficiencies and Effectiveness ”  After you’ve read the paper let us know what you thought of the content.  We’ve just made it a whole lot easier to communicate with us and let us know what’s on your mind.  Teeco Solutions just added a Blog to our website.  You can connect with us and share your comments by visiting us a http://www.teecosolutions.com/blog/

All the Best

If you’re like most conscientious tent and party rental operators you’re always striving to discover opportunities to improve the operating efficiencies of your business.  But when you stop to think about it just where are the greatest opportunities to maximize efficiencies in your operations.  One doesn’t have to think too long or hard to come to recognize that each and every time one of your employees either moves or stops moving presents an opportunity to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and thereby increase profits for your business.  To better understand the work processes of your business, you may want to undertake your own time-study analysis.  Use a stopwatch and a pen and paper and study how long specific labor-dependent operations take.  Ask yourself how the specific operation could be done more quickly, more efficiently, but without wearing your crew out, because wearing your crew out is a sure way to decrease productivity and incur the immeasurable costs of personal stress and accidents.

Pay particular attention to repetitive tasks, because repetitive tasks are the most likely candidates for mechanization.  As Henry Ford discovered about a century ago, mechanization reduces labor costs while increasing profit and safety.  In addition, machines will do the same job with the same quality, day after day.

The same principles of mechanization that benefit manufacturing apply to a service-operation business like tent rental as well.  Once you identify the most-repetitive tasks, look for machinery that will do that work.

News from the Front

Our customers continue to tell us just how valuable it has been for them to move away from doing things “the old way” and stepping up to mechanize the manual.  – Richard Young, Event Rental, Gretna, LA http://www.youreventdelivered.com/ shared with us the following: “Buying our first machine was a big decision for our company after learning about so many different cleaning styles being used in our industry.  We definitely made the right move.  Our machine not only does a better job, but does the work of two full time staff and shows up for work everyday.”

If you have a story to share with us about your operations, please drop us an email at fromthefront@teecosolutions.com or visit our blog at http://www.teecosolutions.com/blog/