Hello All,
It’s newsletter time again. As I seem to say every month, wow, where has the time gone? We have so much stuff going on right now we are working hard to keep everything on track and moving as planned.
Project ‘Polaris’
This month has been dominated by project ‘Polaris’. As you know, Lone Star is building our own analytics platform for acute care hospitals that will provide data on all the systems within a hospital that Lone Star touches. It will have additional features as well, including information screens in and out of the rooms and fall prediction. This is in cooperation with our partners and is going to become a solution that will create more opportunities for us to install more nurse call and RTLS systems over time. We are in the process of naming this solution and conducting background checks on the potential names to make sure they are available to trademark, a necessity when selling a product like this nationwide. We are looking to sell this within our territory as well as through our partnership with the SD6 group and others. We will be meeting with the SPC on Monday and hopefully have a name identified and start a marketing campaign on the new product with a logo, blog posts, articles, a dedicated website, and demonstration information/Q&As on the application, as well as the value of the system. More on this over the next month.
Striving for Consistency
Dan, Victor, and I have traveled to the other offices to work on the One Lone Star initiative. We continue to look for ways to make the company more efficient and more consistent. Although supply shortages and surcharges resulted in excess costs last year, still, we have issues with labor usage on some of the larger projects. The question is, do we add more labor to every project and run the risk of not getting the project or do we manage the labor better in some way? We know what it takes to do these jobs, we have been doing them for years. So, we need to consistently manage and predict the hours and schedule the labor as needed to bring our projects in at the planned margin. That is where the One Lone Star initiative comes in. We know how to do it, we just need to share that information and make sure it is managed consistently in every office. Most offices are exhibiting consistency, however, there are a couple of areas where we have let some of our old procedures resurface and it’s time to revisit that. Victor and Dan will become more common sights in all the offices as they work to share this throughout the company.
Economic Outlook
As you read this, we are just finishing the NSCA, Business & Leadership Conference (BLC). This has been an excellent conference, and we have 27 Lone Star and CareSight employees present. We listened to a number of speakers on the economic outlook, who are all reversing their previous predictions of a recession in 2023. The consensus is 2023 and 2024 are going to be good and 2025 appears to be the start of a recession. Not sure I’m ready to believe that yet, but a strong 2023 is good news. I am always impressed with the quality of the speakers and subjects presented during the BLC. We’ll see if we can get a couple of articles from the classes we attended.
Keeping Us All Connected
Donna Montgomery just hosted our Town Hall for this month and she talked about the LSC Employee Counsel, its focus, and what it will be doing in the future. We believe the counsel is an essential piece of our collective team and will start taking on more responsibilities like owning the employee survey going forward.
Well, that is all for now. As always, we appreciate what you do at Lone Star, and we know it is our employees that have made Lone Star what it is today and what it will be going forward. What you do matters on so many levels. Thank you for being here and doing what you do!
Until next time,
Ray