The right investment in personal protective equipment can mean a lot for your bottom line, because PPE does more than just keep your workforce safe when it’s used correctly. While many forms of PPE are required by OSHA and compliance is overseen to ensure worker protections, most of those pieces of equipment are sensible supplies that help companies avoid lost productivity and respond to minor incidents before they spiral out of control. Protective equipment needs vary a lot by industry and the exact nature of your work, so your choice of supplier is also important if you’re going to find all the right gear at the right price in one place.
Why Use a Single Supplier?
If you rely on several sources for different kinds of PPE, you need to do the administrative work of tracking the inventory you order from each supplier and placing orders when new supplies are needed. Consolidating your PPE purchases to a single supplier with the selection to meet your needs means streamlining that administrative work and making your PPE reorder more cost-effective. Similarly, ordering the right quantities of supplies at the right times can have a huge impact on your bottom line, since some items vary in cost seasonally and other have large volume discounts. It’s a lot more cost-effective to spend your supply time looking for sales and other deals than juggling a bunch of catalogs just to keep yourself in stock.
How To Pick the Right PPE Supplier
Obviously, if you’re looking to have a single personal protective equipment supplier, you need one that can deliver all the equipment you buy on a regular basis. Your basic items like ear plugs, glasses, and first aid supplies are a must. You also need to be able to get signage and other supplies, but most importantly, you need to be able to count on them to continue providing the right equipment if your business expands or you take on work you’ve never done before. That means previewing their selections to see if they are going to be a good fit for you after your next few planned upgrades.
It’s not always possible to find a single supplier you can grow with forever, but the more selection your PPE provider has, the better the chances are that you will be able to rely on them for years to come. As you form an ongoing relationship and your business becomes a known quantity, you might even be able to influence the selection by providing feedback to your supplier. If they know an item will sell, they’ve got incentive to stock it.
