Seth Patin, chief executive officer and founder of LogistiVIEW, and David Meyn, senior director of distribution at Cintas, discuss optimizing labor visibility and productivity at the uniform company.

Cintas, a uniform and apparel goods and services company with a million customers in the U.S. and Canada, struggled to get sufficient visibility into the productivity and efficiency of its labor force in its garment distribution centers and manufacturing plants. The problem was particularly acute in understanding what workers who applied emblems and other embellishments to garments were doing, Meyn says. 

“In the past, all this data was self-reported at the end of a shift,” he says. “The workers would tell us what they did during the day. We didn't have a warehouse management system or a labor management system that allowed us to see exactly what that productivity and efficiency was.”

Several vendors were interviewed, but most couldn’t connect to Cintas’s systems. Data extraction was much easier with the LogistiVIEW system, Meyn says.

Capturing labor productivity in value-added services environments tends to slow workers down and make them less productive, Patin says. “A key part of the solution we provided for Cintas was a tablet-based platform that applies a very rapid web-based screen. Users can tap in data very quickly and continue on their way. By providing that in the cloud on a web-based platform, it allowed us to deploy across multiple sites simultaneously. It also provided input and output from their business systems in a controlled way.”

Meyn says the easy-to-use tablets have enabled quick and accurate data capture without slowing the sewing and application process at Cintas. And the relationship continues. “Software is a bit of a living and breathing thing,” Patin says. “If you buy transactionally and don't have a relationship with a vendor long term, chances are it's not as valuable.”