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Cintas Journal
Cintas Corporation is the largest company in terms of uniform provision in the United States of America. Having its headquarters located in Cincinnati, Ohio, Cintas serves over 1 million customers with their 420 locations globally. It offers a wide range of uniforms including tile and carpet cleaning, service products such as mat services, safety and first aid training, as well as the shredding segment. It also employs diversity in its businesses in order to alleviate the involved risks, thus earning the name, a solutions provider. It attributes its success to the planned business strategies it employs in the sense that it utilizes its recession period by improving its business processes. Additionally, the cooperation embraces partnerships with relevant stakeholders in the market such as Rubbermaid, which provides mops, Diversey whose dealings involve cleaning unit for clients and Carhatt, which deals with heavy-duty uniforms. Cintas Cooperation considers itself as being a socially responsible organization since it embraces the green SCM, which lessens carbon footprint. Cintas Cooperation attributes its success to its strategic management planning.
Currently, the Cintas Cooperation is diversifying its services by integrating tools and techniques that improves its processes. According to the six-sigma philosophy, the quality of products should be 99.9997% while the defects should be less than 3.4 per million and the capability ratio are two. This means that it has to employ the principles of the philosophy by placing its focus on the client. Consequently, it should acknowledge the process while ensuring that it flows smoothly, supervise and condense variation and involve the stakeholders as well as eliminate non-valuable wastes and steps such as defects, waiting, creating inventories and over-processing. The benefits behind the systematic process intrigued the company to propose projects with which it could help in broadening its customer base while reducing wastes and losses. These projects revolved around emergent issues such as true-count, in thick, honeycomb system, A/R reduction and inconsistent pricing.
In order to push through with the projects, the company needs to employ specific types of processes and facilities. In such co-operations, integration of the batch shop process is most significant since it ensures a continuous flow of produced products from the manufacturing section to marketing. The first structures in manufacturing are the job shops. Increase in manufacturing volume standardizes merchandise offerings hence, changing the structure to batch flow, followed by assembly line and finally the continuous flow. Facility layouts are equally important since they provide the process design. Process, product, cellular and fixed position layouts help the company in connecting the line flow as well as conveyors, whose movements depend on gravitational flow. Cintas intentions were to utilize pallets with elevated labeled racks. In order to prevent damages, it wrapped shrank pallets that were available in the cartons. Additionally, it increased the machinery used in measuring cleaning solutions as well as standardizing and measuring the weights if dirty items. Analysis of the processes also included elimination of wastes by tracking the function of the washers in accordance to time. The following process involved sorting the uniforms according to routes, customer, and gender and by sizes. After sorting, it checks its uniforms to eliminate defects by the quality control sector. The uniforms are then moistened, dried, labeled with badges and finally inquiring about the maintenance of the non-stock items.
However, every premise has to face some constraints. According to Goldratt, constraints limit a manageable system from achieving its goals, thereby suggesting that the weakest link in a chain makes it less strong. Therefore, identifying of these constraints is essential in actualizing its success. This also involves exploiting the constraint, aligning the organizational system to support the decision made and raising the constraints. Cintas employed this process and continued using it since it forms a cycle. Furthermore, it set out to improve its operations involving produce expectations, identified workload, and refined processes.
Further improvements in Cintas Cooperation would increase its client base while increasing the company’s efficiency. These include integrating the ERP system into its IT systems. The ERPsim lab would be most beneficial since it develops researches and transfers important techniques in IT. This means that it automates the transition from planning to procurement and finally to sales processes. This technique facilitates understanding of the enterprise concepts, involved technical skills and identification of the supporting nature of the ERP system. These systems coexist around an integrated system such as SAP that has data tables.
Whenever a client changes certain aspects, the system interprets it as a transaction. The database exists within a shared interface such that all users can exploit the ongoing transactions including the finishing orders, tracking and reporting. This would benefit the company since it would be able to keep track of its records. The ability of the systems to trace transactions lessens cases of customer-company disputes involving defects since the operation is reversible. Additionally, the system is capable of reporting queries involving transactions by using the existing data. This enables the company keep track of its business dealings while improving its customer service provision.