Jones Yarn: A Sophisticated Resource for the Mop Industry
by R. Bruce Gebhardt
from the March/April 2001 issue of "Brushware"

The mop industry can now benefit from the proprietary and information-technology resources of one its major suppliers.

Jones Yarn, headquartered in Humboldt, Tennessee, is the leading mop-yarn producer in the United States, and first or second in the world. It can produce traditional cotton yarn, but rayon and mostly synthetic blends now are the major yarn producers. Jones Yarn produces over 100 types of yarn for the mop industry. Its yarn also goes into apparel, packaging, cordage, industrial textiles, home furnishings, upholstery, and floor coverings.

Ralph Jones III, 44, President and CEO of the 65 year-old firm, has "re-imagined" the company as a provider of the market information as well as mop yarn. Jones Yarn often alerts mop-makers about other companies they can partner with to build their product lines. Such information can be essential in outfitting companies for survival in the fast-consolidating industry. Jones defined its scope as "marketknowledge to enable customers to understand the volume of business, among our customers' customers and in the retail, 'jan-san,' and wholesale-discount markets.

"By understanding these markets, we at Jones Yarn are in a better position to offer services, products, and information to our customers. This information is necessary for them to maximize their core competencies in those markets."

Widespread Rapid Change

The very pace of reconstructing in the industry is the greatest obstacle to analysis, he told us in a late-November interview in his office. There's a lot happening.

"The biggest structural change in our industry," Jones said, "is what's happening in the distribution networks. You have smaller janitorial distributors being gobbled up, moving in co-ops to get size. There are large distribution networks being bought up by paper-suppliers or paper-distributors or whoever else it may be.

"You're seeing a real consolidation in that market place. And in competition with that you've got the home centers that have expanded their products on the cleaning side. Then there are the buying clubs like Costco and Sam's that are all involved in this marketplace.

"Thus, it's very difficult to determine how many of the small consumers, the small building-service contractors, are all going in to Home Depot or Sam's to do their buying when traditionally they used to go into a janitorial distributor.

"Now some of the home centers even have people out making sales calls! So they're actually in direct competition with the janitorial distributors.

"To summarize, there is a real muddying of retail and janitorial; historically, there's been a separation. If someone was selling in a Target or K-mart or a Wal-Mart, you knew were they stood versus folks that where selling into strictly janitorial distribution.

"With all these shifts and transformation, "the total volume of demand for mops and brooms and brushes may seem to be growing because of a change in business, where somebody picks up some Home Depot stores and Home Depot is expanding. Conversely you have some of the janitorial distributors doing less and less.

"It's just like every industry where consolidation is going on. The key buyers are getting bigger. There are a limited number of folks that can sell into those bigger buyers. It forces consolidation in the mop-manufacturing industry itself."

Internal Innovation

Not all developments in the industry involve the big getting bigger, nor are the changes necessarily forced on unwilling companies. Some changes benefit all and win wide acceptance. One of the industry's major developments in the last five to seven years has been the twist-mop; sometimes called "self-wringing". It has rejuvenated stick goods, Jones declared, by bringing attention to them all. The originators made the twist-mop a premium product. Now there are a variety of products: lower-cost using cotton yarn, higher-cost using blends. Jones Yarn sells for both classes. (Some twist mops do not use yarn.)

Another recent gain for a large segment of the mop industry is that the schools have been changing their maintenance systems, Jones said. The systems "used to buy on a bid basis and take in large quantities once a year," he explained. But now, "They're starting to buy periodically through the year rather than concerning it in the fall.

"Part of that is because of year-round school. Maintenance programs go more than nine months now, so that is changing buying habits."

"Doesn't that also increase demand?" we asked.

"You would think it would," Jones agreed, but he said that with periodic buying it's more difficult to track volume changes.

"If I were to look at the entire industry and ask, 'Is consumption up or down in the amount of yarn going into mops?Õ I'd say it's probably flat to down over the last five years, probably the last ten."

The reason for that is not so much that the number of units may be down, it may actually be up, but the weight of the mops is down. People are going to lighter-weight mops. Part of the reason is price; mops are ultimately sold by weight, and a lighter-weight mop is a lower-priced product. But the lighter-weight mops that are loop-end products last longer, particularly if they are made out of blends instead of just cotton. With lighter-weight blends that last longer going into more mops, you're seeing a lower total demand for pounds of yarn."

We asked whether buyers of smaller mops are only fooling themselves. Aren't smaller mops less efficient?

"In some ways," he replied, "but with blends and the way they're constructing them today, they're doing a good job of making them spread over a good surface area. Now if you start looking at weight issues, yes, there is some self-deception in that.

"I believe that you're getting smarter buyers. The mop industry is doing a good job of working with distributors and selling a certain mop for a certain purpose -- stripping a floor, applying a floor finish, and so forth. And that's been the benefit. The key is the mop-manufacturer working with a distributor to show the consumers how to decrease their labor costs by using a specific tool. If somebody's stripping a floor, the significant thing isn't the cost of the mop; it's the cost of the man or lady holding the handle. The cost of the mop is kind of incidental when you look at the job that's being accomplished.

"With labor cost going up, people are more keen to ask, 'What are these labor-saving, efficiency-producing products?' A mop is great for that!"

Asked to summarize the late-2000 market conditions, Jones said that demand conventionally fell off in November. In 2000 the decline started earlier, in late October. This may partly reflect the school procurement changes.

Specializing & Generalizing

One strategy is when buyers are generalizing is for makers to specialize. This trend has risen. "We're finding a lot of mop-manufacturers becoming more specialized," Jones said. "There'll be some manufacturers that will do a better job making for instance, loop-end mops versus deck-mops. They'll buy their deck mops on the outside from another manufacturer and combine that with their own product line to sell to their customers. They may also be selling their loop-end mops to somebody who does a better job with deck mops.

"There's a lot of business that goes on between manufacturers, a tremendous amount. I think it's healthy for the industry, but it can also be confusing, from my standpoint, understanding people's competencies.

"Now that we can do, when we know we've got a customer that is looking for a particular deck-mop, dust-mop, loop-mop - is to direct two of them together so they can both carry a more complete line.

"We feel that some of this market knowledge is a key component that we have to offer. That's a big service. If we can help people be smarter in what they do, our whole role as a manufacturer is not to make a product, our role is to solve our customers needs, desires, and problems. If we can find a solution to a problem that they have that would make them stronger, more profitable, a better company, then we want to provide that solution.

"We would like that solution to be yarn, but it's not always yarn. It may be a service factor, it may be a wide assortment of issues that we can deal with by making information available."

Jones Yarn obtains some of its information in a simple, low-tech fashion: it asks. Jones explained, "We ask our customers, 'What products are selling to other mop manufacturers and would you like us to mention your name in that connection?' We get out of the middle of it. All we do is say, 'Hey, you might want to call this manufacturer, the might be able to help you,' and put them together. Our role is not to become a broker in the sense of brokering for a price. Our concern is to help our customers.

"There are a lot of choices in the market today - yarn manufacturers, mop-manufacturers - and we want to separate ourselves from everybody else. We want to lead and be cost-competitive at the same time.

ISO 9002

Increasingly, Jones Yarn will be drawing on its own management information systems to produce more-technical information that benefits customers. Some of this capacity has been available for a while; the company's own monitoring procedures have been intensive. Augmenting them are techniques that developed out of ISO 9002. That is a performance-monitoring regimen promoted by the International Standards Organization. It monitors all facets of company operations and demands constant improvement.

The two most important data Jones lives by are acceptance rate and on-time-delivery rate. The acceptance rate is 99.64%; the on-time-delivery rate is 98%. A plant-tourer sees a lot of measuring going on. The Yarn & Fiber Laboratory, for instance, analyzes yarn for fiber content, strength, evenness, weight, absorption, shrinkage, launderabilitly, friction testing, and more.

There are gauges and gauges throughout the plant, but a fascinating one on the side of a spinning machine captivated this viewer. It measured and displayed the purity of the material being spun, in "real time," as it went through the machine. Green and red lights flashed up and down a scale. It was like something you would see on a neat train set.

These are examples of philosophy long in place at Jones Yarn.

"We continue to look for ways to improve ourselves," Jones said.

"We want to continue to compete and we want to decrease costs."

Jones Yarn called in an outside firm to survey customers about the company. One result was a new initiative in e-business. It will probably open in the first part of 2001. The object is to develop a partnership, providing market and product information to Jones' customers. "We want to be the low-cost supplier, not just the low-priced supplier," Jones said.

Another result of the review was to create systems that document what the six yarn-spinning plants (four in Humboldt, one in Milan, and one in Covington) were doing. (The company also has cotton-batting facilities in Memphis and Morristown, Tennessee and Hernando, Mississippi.) The six spinning plants are now linked by email. Headquarters can monitor the results on any given machine. This has aided in retraining employees (called associates) and re-engineering products.

Signing on to ISO 9002 added more items to the analytical agenda. "ISO 9002 hasn't brought us a lot of business, but it made us more efficient," Jones said.

An ISO auditor came to the company to review topics from repairs to documentation, with the idea that the company could produce "better products more consistently." Improving documentation is one of the major emphases of the program. The auditor defined responsibilities for the staff, quality control procedures requiring them to document and verify.

In addition to the outside auditor, an internal audit team was formed and rigorously trained for a week. In addition to monitoring production quantity, quality, and efficiency, internal auditors meet on a diversity of matters including safety, human resources, inventory control, and supplies. Even Jones, President and CEO, is expected to keep track of his time and activities for their review.

The outside auditor was an engineer who has been with NASA. Jones quipped, "We're not rocket scientists, but we have one coming into our office!"

Mops & Brooms

At National Brooms & Mops Meetings, more and more traditional corn-broom makers have shown an interest in making and selling mops. We asked Jones how this might affect the mop industry and his business.

"The interesting thing," he said, "is that, generally speaking, most of these people who've been making brooms have been in mops. They may not have been making them themselves, but they have been selling mops made by another producer. What we are seeing more than anything is a shift of business that was being done by one mop manufacturer selling on an EOM basis to a broom manufacturer. Now they're not buying as much over here and another one over there is making up for him. So it's a shift of business." Thus, the broom-makers have been doing just what the mop-makers have -- finding other cleaning products to complement and expand their lines.

Imports and Exports

We asked if imports are a serious threat to the U. S. mop yarn. Jones acknowledged that imports have increased in the last decade, but that he thought they'd leveled off. He said that smaller U. S. makers are more inclined to use imported yarn than larger ones are. Financial analysis leads larger, more sophisticated companies to conclude that manufacturing is as cheap as buying. It can neutralize freight costs. Further, some U. S. manufacturers have bought advanced machinery, so "they're driving a lot of their labor costs out."

Not only are the prices comparable between domestic and imported yarn, but Jones contends that domestic quality is higher and more consistent. "We're seeing some importation of finished mops, say in the deck-mop arena where you have more labor involved than in some products. Actually, though, we're doing pretty good job of exporting our yarn into some markets that are turning around and selling their mops back in the U. S. So we feel that we are being competitive.

"We're not going to always beat the imports with the lowest price, but what we are going to do is help maintain their inventories at a much lower level than will our competitors. We're going to help them turn their inventories more. We're going to be able to work with these folks and with their customers. We have access. Our sales folks are capable of holding seminars for their salesmen and their distributors' salesmen on yarn and their applications within the industry. We will have that new interactive web for our customers only.

"We don't intend to provide a lot of information necessarily for those folks who aren't our customers," Jones cautioned. "Our customers are the ones we want to take care of."

Educational Emphasis

Computers provide statistical information, systems like ISO 9002 heighten a collective corporate awareness, but people themselves have to be informed, skilled, and motivated in order to contribute to the overall effort to improve a company. Throughout Jones Yarn, from the top executives to production workers, there is a strong emphasis on education of various kinds. Moreover, there is a strong religious underpinning to the company, evident in corporate publications. It implies that the company supports its employees as people, not merely factors of production. In this context, while an educated work force helps the company, education helps the associates themselves.

Ralph Jones III, himself, has made management education a continuing activity in his life. He has attended courses at Stanford, Auburn, and Vanderbilt Universities, and currently participates in a yearlong program at the Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern University, and entitled "Survival Skills for the New Economy." It teaches management techniques and new accounting methods. There are five yearly meetings. At a recent one, participants visited the Chairman and CEO of McDonald's. Management guru Chris Argyros has addressed them. They work on projects via the internet.

A mid-November "Survival Skills" meeting prevented Jones from attending the National Broom and Mop Meeting in Nashville in November. He usually attends and actively participates, sometimes as a speaker.

Still, four staff members represented Jones Yarn at the broom-and-mop conclave -- slightly under ten percent of total meeting attendance. The company as a whole has always lent strong support to the group, and staffers attend other conventions as well. An important element of corporate philosophy is that "People have to learn to adapt to change," Jones believes, with an emphasis on "learn".

Back home, Jones Yarn pays a "bounty" to employees who earn their GED and subsidizes employees' tuition to colleges or other higher education. The company extends its interest into the community as well, supporting an elementary school in Humboldt. Jones himself attended Humboldt public schools.

Family Firm

Jones Yarn is one of those old-line family firms so influential in the development of the mop, broom, and brush industries. The company was founded by Ralph Jones III's grandfather and great uncle and sustained by his father and uncle. We were pleased to meet his father, Ralph Jones, Jr., Chairman of the Board, during our visit to Humboldt.

Firmly rooted in the culture and values of western Tennessee, Jones Yarn provides stability and, increasingly, support to a far-flung industry that is super-rapidly transforming.