As a Health & Safety Manager, you already have a full plate in your day-to-day responsibilities. So when it comes time to tackle a more cyclical task, like selecting and purchasing new FR garments for your team, it can be hard to feel like you have enough time to do anything beyond repeat what you’ve done before. The problem with putting your FR purchase process on autopilot is that time moves quickly and before you know it, your people are wearing FR garments made with technology that lags current offerings by years—or even decades.
It's Doesn’t Have to Be All on You
While we certainly recommend that safety managers stay tuned into industry innovations and updates through channels like trade shows and newsletters, one key mindset shift can help you leverage a resource you may not have taken full advantage of: your supply chain “team.”
Your focus day in and day out is ensuring your workers have a safe environment in which to do their best work. We know that includes a lot of factors, only one of which is what protective garments they’re wearing. You also have to think about all the rest of their equipment, safety procedures and how to communicate them, triaging any safety issues, and handling (hopefully rare) incidents.
The savviest managers know that it is more effective and efficient to do the work that they are best at and outsource the rest. When you view yourself as part of an interconnected team that includes experts in the various types of safety equipment you need for your workers, you begin to see the true value of what may have been solely transactional relationships. Suddenly, you don’t have to pore over the entire industry landscape of one piece of your safety plan like gloves or glasses or pants. You have partners in the supply chain whom you can call on to give you the rundown and make recommendations based on your needs and budget.
Find a Head Coach
If you think about your FR garment purchasing process as a football game, you’re looking for a head coach to be your partner. You need someone who has a view of the whole field and isn’t on the scrimmage line playing for your business.
Who are the head coaches? If you’re concerned about getting sales pitches rather than unbiased information, it helps to look a little further up the chain at the companies who are B2B rather than B2C. For instance, at TenCate Protective Fabrics, we supply fabrics to manufacturers who make garments, which are then distributed to you via a distributor. Our only allegiance is to the end user, and our only focus is the fabrics. We wouldn’t start talking about our FR fabrics and then also try to get your fall protection business—we only deal with fabrics.
Choosing to reach out to contacts at highly specialized companies like TenCate Protective Fabrics gives you not only the benefit of keeping conversations focused, but also the advantage of the depth of knowledge that goes along with a specialization. When a product portfolio is limited to one type of safety equipment or material—in our case, protective fabrics—rather than a wide-ranging catalogue of products in every safety category, you can be sure that their understanding of that niche is exhaustive. And then you don’t have to exhaust yourself learning everything they already know; you can simply pick up the phone and get answers based on your specific needs from an expert who takes the time to learn what those needs are and makes recommendations accordingly.
Work with People You Know, Like, and Trust
At the end of the day, a lot of safety managers go with what seems to be the path of least resistance and rinse and repeat their past FR garment order with little variation. But when you build and leverage relationships with experts at companies like TenCate Protective Fabrics, you create another path of least resistance, one which you don’t have to walk alone.
FR garments are an important part of your safety program and should be treated with the same consideration as any other piece of safety equipment, but that doesn’t mean you must spend tons of your valuable time to make the best decision. When you’ve got a friend at TenCate Protective Fabrics, you can skip the headache and get straight to bolstering your safety strategy with solutions that fit your budget and your workers’ safety needs. And as your partner/head coach/friend, your expert at TenCate Protective Fabrics is there in between purchasing cycles, too. When you need related technical information fast, we’re always available to help.
Building relationships is our preferred way to engage with our partners throughout the industry, and we know firsthand the value of working with people you know, like, and trust. There are a lot of steps in the sales process, with a lot of variables that can go sideways. You need to know, like, and trust the folks involved in that process, and that starts with getting to know them.
Looking for tips on how to optimize your budget spend? Check out our blog post on the topic here.
Get to know us
Reach out to connect with a TenCate Protective Fabrics specialist and add us to your team today.
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