Business View Magazine | March 2020

129 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 CROTHALL LAUNDRY AND L INEN SERV I CES very regional-based and/or mom-and-pop-based with family-owned laundries. In the past three to four years, we’ve seen an influx of private equity into the marketplace, and we believe we will continue to see private equity coming in that will see continued consolidation in order to drive efficiencies of scale and for folks to continue to be competitive in the space. “This is different than what you would see in Canada or Europe, where you’ve got more state and central control on healthcare services. There’s 12 SKUs, and all the textiles are white, and there’s a higher level of automation. In the U.S., there’s still a lot more variety. However, we believe that continued automation will be critical on how we handle processing, how we manage delivery, and drive productivity within our plants. “We think there’s a lot of it in the coming three to five years. We can continue consolidation in the marketplace, and that’s just what we’ve seen and what we believe will continue to happen. Then there’ll be continued drive for more automation in the marketplace, as well, to drive efficiency as a response to what are challenges in the labor market shortages.” BVM: How do you go to market? Barner: “In the world of healthcare, you’ve got large GPOs – the large group purchasing organizations. Vizient was a combination of VHA, University HealthSystem Consortium, Novation, and MedAssets’s Spend and Clinical Resource Management segment, including Sg2, to form the nation’s largest member-driven healthcare performance improvement company. Vizient has members that will participate with that GPO and those members are healthcare individual hospitals. We have a long-standing relationship with Vizient and a long-standing relationship with HealthTrust HPG, as well. “So when we’re looking to go to market, we have partners, we have scale. We are one of the