Towel & Tissue: On A Roll

A roll of towels or tissue is among the least expensive things a housekeeping manager or building service contractor (BSC) must buy. Taken cumulatively, however, these simple paper products add up to a seriously expensive line item. In fact, it’s not unusual for a facility to spend one-third of its supply budget on consumables alone.

Given how large of an expense paper goods are — and with their cost increasing many times this year — price continues to be a big concern for housekeeping managers and BSCs. But buyers also worry about quality, which affects perception and usage.

“You get what you pay for,” says John Lawter, associate director of plant, building and grounds services at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The university spends $380,000 a year on paper products or 35 percent of its materials budget.

“Cheap product tends to lead to over usage as the user has the tendency to use more product to compensate for the [poor quality],” says Lawter.

To assist custodial departments and contractors struggling with shrinking budgets and high user expectations, jan/san distributors must help their customers find the best product for the best price. The margins on towels and tissues may not be as high as other SKUs, but these basic items have great value.

“There are probably no products more critical than paper products in custodial operations,” says Alan Bigger, director of facilities at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., whose department goes through more than 70,000,000 feet of toilet paper a year. “We may run out of disinfectant, glass cleaner, or furniture polish, and there will be little public outcry. Run out of toilet paper and the organization will have a major public relations crisis.”

Get The Look

There are a variety of criteria a buyer uses to evaluate towels and tissues. Among the most important factors are softness, absorption rates, waste minimization, aesthetics and price.

While color and odor may seem frivolous, these are often most evident to end users who may not notice more technical aspects. Selling the look and feel of a paper product is most important for high-end markets and for low-traffic facilities that can afford to spend more on thicker, more attractive products because they use less.

An example of the power of user perception is environmentally friendly paper tissue. These products have been slow to gain acceptance.

“With hand towels you get less of a concern about green but with toilet tissue you get more complaints,” says Paul Condie, director of operations of KBM Building Services in San Diego. “They could make it more attractive with embroidering and stitching and things.”

When pitching to average or lower-end markets and those with high traffic, the key talking points switch from aesthetics to configuration. For example, paper towels are available folded or on rolls, while toilet tissue comes with or without cores, on single or jumbo rolls, and in one or two ply. The style selected affects perception and usage so it is important to balance both issues when evaluating various price points.

Towel Selection

Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple formula for choosing between folded and rolled towels. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, both in the products themselves and the systems used to dispense them.

Folded towels (single-fold, center-fold, or multi-fold) are often available in softer and more absorbent varieties, they are portable to a worker’s office, and they carry a perception of quality. On the downside, folded towels are by far the most wasted paper product because users tend to grab more than needed and rarely unfold them to maximize usage. This overuse increases labor costs because the towels must be replenished more frequently.

Rolled towels reduce waste and labor costs because most dispensers restrict how much paper a user can grab at once. Customers may be frustrated by this limitation, and they become very unhappy when an automatic dispenser malfunctions.

“We use a combination of towels,” says Dennis Dusenberry, senior project manager for Woodley Building Maintenance in Kansas City, Mo. “We use multi-fold towels in office buildings and in high-usage spaces like retail areas and convention halls, I use roll towels.”

There are dispensers that can accommodate large quantities of folded towels or more than one 800-foot rolled towel. These high-capacity systems minimize restocking time. The less often a unit is emptied, the less often it must be refilled, which can save big dollars in labor costs and reduce customer complaints about missing supplies.

Touch-free systems are moving from trendy to expected. Building occupants prefer these dispensers because they minimize the spread of infection. Custodians appreciate the metering capabilities, which reduce how many times a dispenser must be refilled and also reduce how much waste is left in bins and on the floor.

“The manager of one facility advised me that he was able to decrease the consumption of hand drying paper goods by over 30 percent just by using metered self-dispensing towel systems.” Bigger says.

Automatic dispensers may provide substantial savings, but switching from folded to roll towels is not inexpensive. Cheap dispensers are prone to problems and outfitting an entire building with new, quality machines is a huge capital outlay. A sizable investment has prevented the University of Michigan from converting to a touch-free system.

“Touch-free systems are here to stay, and is the direction the industry will continue moving towards,” Lawter says. “We are not averse to a touch-free system, but it is an economic challenge to convert the number of buildings we service to this type of system.”

Distributors can help their customers make the switch by providing extended contracts, or leases.

Tissue Selection

The top considerations when choosing tissue are quality and quantity. There is no janitorial product that building occupants care more about than toilet tissue. Give them something too thin or too rough and they will complain. Of course, high-quality paper comes with a higher price tag. And better tissue is thicker, which means less fits on a roll so users go through rolls more quickly.

Although top-quality single-roll tissue has its uses, such as in high-profile areas or single-stall restrooms with space limitations, it is not cost effective for most settings. The most popular product is a jumbo roll, which has two to 10 times more tissue than a single roll and is available in varying degrees of quality.

“We use a lot of jumbo tissue,” Dusenberry says. “It is used in high-use restrooms due the volume of tissue that is consumed in these areas. It allows us to use the double dispenser so there is next to no chance of a stall being out of tissue.”

Jumbo rolls require special dispensing systems that can accommodate their size. These dispensers are large, especially side-by-side models that make a spare roll immediately available after the first roll is depleted.

As with towels, using high-capacity systems reduces the need for restocking and the associated labor costs. Switching a 100-stall facility from single-roll dispensers to jumbo rolls with 2,000 feet of tissue can save as much as 60 percent in associated labor costs, says Bigger. Plus, newer tissue dispensers feature metering systems similar to those frequently used on towel dispensers.

If space or aesthetic concerns don’t allow for bulky jumbo-roll dispensers, another option is coreless tissue. Removing the center tube from a roll of tissue allows for a better-quality product that takes up less space.

“You get bigger bang for the buck,” Condie says. “The more we can store in a space is preferable. Jumbo-roll dispensers are sometimes overpowering. A coreless roll takes up the same space as high-end rolls but have more paper.”

The University of Michigan uses coreless paper and dispensers in 55 to 60 percent of its restrooms and has found that the system requires less maintenance because it has fewer moving parts.

“A maintenance mechanic has been sent once to fix one of the coreless dispensers,” Lawter says. “Prior to switching, the same mechanic would spend most of their day fixing jumbo-roll dispensers and the department absorbed the cost of the repairs.”

Other concerns custodians have with tissue are the common use of proprietary dispensers and the lack of standardization in roll size. Manufacturer-specific dispensers don’t allow the flexibility to change products if a better or cheaper option presents itself. Manufacturers also change tissue sizes with little or no advance warning, which can wreak havoc for janitors.

“I just had to go through a facility and put adapters on 53 dispensers because they changed the size of the sheet by one-quarter inch and didn’t tell us,” Condie says. “Until then, we had to set the rolls on the back of toilets, which is unprofessional and unattractive. I’ve seen such changes too many times recently and that’s a frustration.”

Whether it’s helping locate adapters or providing just-in-time ordering for bulky jumbo-roll tissue, distributors are an important ally for their customers when it comes to paper products. And distributors would be well served to remember that towels and tissues are a seriously important issue for a facility and its occupants.

“Probably no product used in restrooms has a greater impact upon the perception of service than paper products,” Bigger says. “Restrooms may smell clean, look clean and be clean, but if the customer is dissatisfied with the paper products used in the restrooms, it will not matter if the facility is clean, people will not want to use it.”

Becky Mollenkamp is a freelance writer based in Des Moines, Iowa. She is a frequent contributor to Sanitary Maintenance.