I want to send a message of reassurance to our customers and partners on the position of Centrex Technologies with relation to COVID-19 (Coronavirus). The media is forecasting an exponential increase in COVID-19 infections worldwide. This will cause extreme stress on many areas of healthcare operations, especially in the area of linen and uniforms. With our large base of customers in the Healthcare industry, our Linenweb® systems, while always considered important, have now become highly critical as healthcare institutions prepare to cope with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When patients present with COVID-19 infection, all linen used for each patient will need to be completely replaced and treated as infectious. Scrub suits by staff will need to be regularly changed during each shift and possibly also cubical curtains. This will greatly increase the volume of infectious linen being sent to healthcare laundries plus cause a significant increase in customer linen demand.
This increased demand is expected to escalate rapidly and continue to escalate over the next few months. Hospitals and healthcare laundries will need to rely on their existing inventory resources to cope with this sudden increase. We are already seeing some of our laundry customers taking over hotels and transforming these into makeshift COVID-19 hospitals. The sudden extra linen requirement cannot be covered by new linen purchases as the lead times to supply are too long.
It is essential therefore that hospitals and linen rental laundries optimize their existing stock to cope with this demand. Excess and idle stock needs to be found and returned to circulation, linen losses need to be minimized or eliminated plus sites that are hoarding linen need to be quickly identified for action. Fortunately, the Linenweb® systems that you are now using already have an excellent range of tools to cover this.
To address the COVID-19 challenge, Centrex Technologies has therefore taken the following actions:
- We are implementing several data mining tools to automatically analyse the customer data we hold identifying sites that have excess stock, high losses and/or potential linen hoarding issues. We will then be contacting the identified customers to assist in addressing this.
- We are upgrading our RFID systems so that COVID-19 infected linen can be flagged. This will use mobile scanners and will allow the COVID-19 infected linen to be isolated which further reduces the likelihood of any physical contact. We will be contacting our Linenweb® RFID system customers to discuss upgrading their RFID Mobile Software to enable this.
- Centrex staff worldwide are now working from home wherever possible to minimize the potential of infection and to ensure that we all remain available to serve our customers. We have checked to ensure that each staff member has adequate infrastructure for this.
- We will ensure that any staff doing work on customer sites take appropriate safety precautions as specified in the Government COVID-19 guidelines.
- We are monitoring our Centrex Data Center to ensure our system remains robust and at peak performance. We have spare capacity that we can add quickly if required. At this stage, we are already seeing an approximate 30% increase in traffic across our servers.
This COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented, but I want to assure our valued customers that all of us here at Centrex Technologies stand ready to support you through this stressful period.
Kevin O’Hara
Director, Centrex Technologies
