ipm | Fumigation Service & Supply, Inc

By Curt Lilleodden

So the budget is tight and you need to trim costs. Corners are cut to maximize profits. Which departments are some of the first in line to get the hatchet? Sanitation and Maintenance. Why? Because your Sanitation and Maintenance departments aren’t actually producing your product, and since, theoretically, they are not producing anything, someone up the corporate ladder decides that these departments are areas where money can be saved.

But is this always a wise decision? Ask any sanitation manager and they will emphatically answer “No!” Well, obviously any manager looking at getting their budget sliced is going to be met with resistance. I am here today to help plead their case.

Eliminating positions and hours in your cleaning staff ultimately means reducing the frequency of the cleaning schedule, or at least the depth of the cleaning process. Any area that once was on a weekly cleaning schedule will be reduced to every other week, month, or in some cases, will get eliminated from the schedule altogether. These areas, over time will begin to rear their ugly head, and the results will be pest sources that can sometimes take weeks and months to track down. As the number of reportable customer complaints rises, the plant manager receives a call from corporate headquarters quality department to ask why? In the meantime, products and your company’s good name is at risk.

Consider purchasing a very well maintained used automobile where the oil was changed and chassis lubricated every three thousand miles, tires were rotated every 10,000 and someone was diligent enough to give it a good weekly scrub. You have acquired yourself a “Cream Puff”. You could probably drive this car thousands of miles trouble free, with doing little or no maintenance. But eventually, the engine uses oil, the valves are shot and the transmission starts slipping. The tires wear out early because the front end needs alignment. In fact the whole front end needs to be rebuilt. New spindles and ball joints, new bearings and tie rod ends and to top it all off, rust is starting to show up on the fender tops and rocker panels. And you say to yourself: “What happened? Everything worked so well for so long, and now it is all falling apart at once!” Now, all of the repairs far outweigh the costs of maintaining it in the first place. Get the picture?

The very same thing will happen in your facility if you cut too deep into your sanitation and maintenance budgets. Some areas of the plant can go a long time with “smoldering” pest issues that go undetected. When pest populations in micro environments such as an unused batch bin or product hung up in an idle shipping conveyor reach a saturation point, there can be mass exodus from the source. By the time the source is located, it is too late; the damage has been done. Fertilized females have moved away from the source and have laid eggs in multiple areas of your facility.

Now you have to pay the staff overtime during a holiday shut down to do extensive cleaning. You may have to fog the facility, or possibly fumigate, and pray that you don’t wind up with a product recall. These costs can sometimes far outweigh the costs of regular cleaning and maintenance.

Meet Curt Lilleodden

Curt Lilleodden is the Regional Manager for Fumigation Service & Supply in Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Curt and his wife Tammy and four children live in Solon, Iowa. He maintains a fumigation office in Cedar Rapids, IA with three fumigation technicians. Curt comes from Hanska, Minnesota where he grew up on a farm. He graduated from Alexandria Technical College in 1987. Curt spent 19 years in pest control before coming to FSS in 2009. His expertise is in structure fumigations, food safety inspections, commodity fumigations and large food safety pest management programs. Curt enjoys hunting and watching his children’s activities. Curt and Tammy’s daughter Sarah was the first recipient of the FSS Scholarship and she attends the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

Curt stated: ““After spending nearly 20 years in the general pest control industry, I welcomed the opportunity to focus my work on stored product pests. The success of a program to manage stored product pests, probably more than any other group of pests, hinges on the joint effort, cooperation, and communication between the pest control provider and the customer. Building these close relationships with my customers and the results that are realized because of these efforts, has been the most rewarding aspect of my career in pest management.”

C.Lilleodden@FumigationZone.com or 1-319-899-8048

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Cleaning is Expensive — Not Cleaning is Even More Expensive