Face to Face Face to Face
with Paul Lewis, managing director of Reintec “Our end-to-end model is changing the industry”
What is Reintec? Reintec - part of the HSS Hire group - is a fully outsourced cleaning equipment solu- tion that provides, manages and maintains cleaning equipment. Basically, customers take the equipment they need to support their cleaning contracts on a long term hire basis but can flex the fleet up or down ac- cording to workload. Kit is swapped out whenever it needs servicing or repairing so there’s no downtime and an online man- agement system helps customers to max- imise control over the equipment they’re using. It sounds like such a great idea that you
can’t believe it hasn’t been done before - but end-to-end outsourcing to this extent is an undeniably new concept in cleaning and Reintec is challenging our industry to think differently.
Why use Reintec? In many industries, outsourcing - as op- posed to just hiring - tools and equipment is becoming commonplace. In cleaning, it’s not….yet! Reintec has offered this to the cleaning market for a while now but people are still more used to buying and managing most of their own kit or partaking in just the most basic hire contracts. But when we asked facilities managers and cleaning contractors about the issues they were fac- ing, we found that equipment came high on
the agenda. They told us they can spend up to a day a week managing equipment and they said that more than 1 in 5 problems were equipment related - yet 1 in 3 only re- placed kit when it actually failed. Over 80% confirmed that margins were being squeezed and around a third said they could not prove whether kit was compliant or that staff were trained to use it. Reintec can help to address a lot of these issues by helping customers to save time, save money and guarantee compliance in a way that owning equipment just can’t match. It’s also a changing world. Our customers
Paul Lewis, MD of Reintec: “In many industries, outsourcing - as opposed to just hiring - tools and equipment is becoming commonplace. In cleaning, it’s not….yet!”
- and their own customers - all want more for less. They need to run 24/7 operations - there’s no time for downtime. Margins will continue to be squeezed and health and safety will only ever become more impor- tant. There’s a lot to juggle and the cleaning industry needs to evolve to keep up and to keep moving forward. One of the ways to do this is to look at how you manage your cleaning equipment and we’re here to offer people an alternative. Equipment is only a small part of the overall picture and is per- haps sometimes overlooked as a result but when you think that around 80% of cleaning costs are labour related, having an equip- ment programme that helps to optimise productivity can actually unlock a huge cost benefit.
Why should cleaning businesses change to the Reintecmodel? I love the saying ‘if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got’ - we’re now working in a world where people all need to deliver more than ever before which means they’re going to have to rethink what they’ve always done in order to do so. In a similar vein, Einstein said that the definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different re- sults’. I’m not saying the cleaning industry is insane but if we want different results - if we want to grow and build and improve - we’ve got to be prepared to at least think about changing how we do things. Take Dick Fosbury as an example - the
guy that invented the Fosbury Flop. Before him, most people tackled the high jump with a scissor jump but suddenly, this new technique literally raised the bar. A different way of doing things totally changed the ca- pacity of this sport. In our own small way, I’d like to think Reintec is helping to drive a similar step-change within the cleaning in- dustry by offering a new way to think about equipment management. I hope this be- comes one of the ways in which our indus- try evolves and helps to shape it for the future.
Continued on Page 30. 28 l C&M l APRIL 2014 l
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