Purell/Gojo: Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Safety of technicians

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Lenny, GOJO has been a great customer of ProntoForms for years and a strong advocate for technology, and we know that your organization's experiencing an enormous surge of interest in your products. I was hoping you could shed some light about what Purell is doing to ensure technician safety in the face of COVID-19? How do you ensure new safety protocols are deployed, understood, and used across a diverse team?

Since most of our work is primarily done in healthcare channels, our policy has always been to follow the safety protocols of the hospital that we're working at. With the recent pandemic, we call ahead of time to the hospitals that we're going to and work with the infection preventionist and the EVS director there to make sure that we're coming in prepared and ready for whatever safety procedures they may have.

Then, as far as the tools and technologies that we're using to help educate and guide our field team, once this travel ban's lifted, we're expecting very high levels of demand for our field service team. We've been working to make sure our ProntoForms apps have consistent terminology and we're all using it the same way. This will help us with onboarding and just-in-time training of additional staff that will surely be needed with the elevated demand once this is all over.

That's actually a very interesting point that you brought up: consistency of language related to procedures as well as updating evolving health and safety protocols for technicians to follow. Keeping language similar to what technicians are used to in the past as well as how the application functions helps you in terms of technicians properly following procedures and completing their work in compliance.

Speed and scale of response

How are you leveraging technology platforms to improve the speed of response? What type of technologies are you using to respond?

We know we're going to be busy. There's going to be new laws and recommendations outside of just healthcare, including nursing homes, schools, and food service organizations that are all going to have different hand hygiene requirements, which will be a huge demand for us. There will likely be a need for us to quickly respond beyond our original field services group with new or updated workflows and additional or augmented resources. But, as I stated before, we use ProntoForms quite extensively and we use it for just-in-time training and onboarding. Before ProntoForms, it took three months to get a technician up and running. We've narrowed it down to weeks with ProntoForms.

In addition, we continue to automate more and more tasks and communications with the end user.

Ensuring compliance

Compliance is more important than ever in the face of COVID-19 and GOJO has extensive experience with health and safety compliance in the field. Can you elaborate on your experiences.

Proper usage of PPE has always been a critical part of being a GOJO field service rep. We're going into every component of a hospital—from the morgue and where they do research to operating areas—so we take putting on PPE and using it appropriately as a very critical part of our success.

Part of this includes keeping track of all the health and safety regulations that are changing. There's companies like Parallon, Reptrax, and Vendormate where they actually send out protocol changes that they have, and then every vendor that's ever been to their hospital gets these updates. We've been tracking those, and then taking those macro trends and notifying our team through our weekly Chatter post that I put out. We share that with the team to make sure that they're following all of those credentials in their work protocols.

Data collection for decision-making

I think part of the scale of response as well as the speed of response is the agility of moving the data where you need it. Could you provide some insight about where your team moves data?

Every field that's in ProntoForms either creates a new field or new object in Salesforce or is pre-populated from Salesforce through a dispatch. Once all the fields are filled out as a data destination, all collected information then goes back and is re-updated in Salesforce. There's no information that we're gathering with ProntoForms that doesn't end up back in Salesforce. We've been able to further tie that data into Tableau where we're able to then run all of our reporting and analytics to help drive improvements.

Phenomenal. You've created an interconnected digital flow that eliminates any data collection gaps in the field and submits data directly into your system of record. Do you leverage these fully digital workflows in other areas of your business?

Over the last five years, we've really worked on making sure that all of our experiences in the field, all of our knowledge, and all of our learnings are actually captured in Salesforce. We then try to be very transparent to all the stakeholders of the information. Our data is being used by our supply chain to better understand throughput, which will allow them to know what they need to make down to the dispenser level. We're also using the information that we're gathering to help inform the next dispenser that's made. The things that we're learning out in the field can hopefully make that new dispenser even better.

It's great to hear that GOJO is keeping pace with the pandemic and ensuring processes are up-to-date and adhering to a high level of compliance. Thanks again for joining our expert panel and sharing insights on how GOJO and the Purell brand have leveraged technology to respond to the pandemic.