Todd M. Schneider
President & Chief Executive Officer at Cintas
Good morning, George. Thanks for the question. Certainly, I expected that inflation in input cost would be something that we would want to be talking about. So we have -- so I have a few examples I'd like to talk about regarding the items that we are -- steps that we're taking to mitigate input cost. But inflation is certainly challenging. It's very much there. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, whether it's fuel or other areas, input costs are real. But we are taking -- we are being very active in taking steps to make sure that we are mitigating that type of exposure.
You mentioned pricing, so certainly, pricing is a component of our strategy, but it is -- by no means, is it the only strategy to combat pricing -- or excuse me to combat inflation. So we're taking other steps in almost all involved technology. And these were all initiatives that we have been working on. However, due to the inflation subject, we decided to pull forward and go faster with them. And individually, they are not massive movers, but collectively, they certainly add up.
So I'll go through a few of those I think might help provide a little color. First off, I mentioned in I think our last call that we have invested in routing technology that is proprietary and really fits our business well. And as long as I've been with the company, it seems like we have tried about every routing software out there, and we finally said, we're going to build it ourselves. We're going to do it, it's going to fit with SAP and it will be -- because we have a unique routing structure.
So we did that. And I'm very thankful that over the past couple of years, we've invested in that technology, we've rolled out across the organization and we're executing on it. Now very important, we recognize that we only generate revenue when the truck stops. When it stops at our customers' place of business, that's when we can generate revenue. So we've got to be more efficient. I'm really pleased with that investment. Certainly, it takes time. There is -- we are very conscious of any customer disruption, but we're trying to go faster with that subject. And again, we're blessed that we made the investment. And if we didn't have it, then it would put much more pressure on the organization with the inflation subject. So again, very pleased that we have that.
We've also, from a technology standpoint, we invested in some -- in automation. We now have three different processes for how to implement automation into our uniform processing facilities. And this provides us flexibility we didn't have in the past. That flexibility is, meaning we can deploy one of those based upon a number of factors, really gets into the footprint of the facility in the number of pieces going through, but we've pivoted on this subject as well to go faster because of what's going on with labor costs certainly. So we're able to automate our facilities in a better fashion.
And then I've got a couple of others that I'll talk about. We now -- we've invested in technology through SAP that allows us to have a centralized dashboard and look at all of our rental processing facilities and understand how they're operating on a daily basis, a real-time basis from an efficiency and effectiveness standpoint. So in the past, we had to go physically see these facilities to understand if they're operating in the manner that we expect, but now we have this real-time dashboard and it allows us to know how we're doing. As a result, there is more accountability and we're getting better. That allows us to improve the efficiencies within our business.
And I've got a few others, but one other I'll give you is we are -- because of the technology we have with SAP now, we're seeing a real nice impact in our ability to share our used inventory of garments across all of our locations. This is due to our stock rooms, which is where we house our used inventory at each of our locations, having real-time inventory tracking and all being on that same system of SAP.
So what it allows us to do is to gain better use of the inventory that was in the past dedicated solely to the individual locations customer base. Now we can spread it out across a much larger customer base. And it also allows us with non-stock sizes to look at where the product is and get it faster to our customers. So I could go on, but I hope hopefully that gives you a few examples of items that proactive steps that we are taking to mitigate the inflation, because again, as I mentioned, it's real. It's challenging, but I'm highly confident the organization we'll be able to manage through this as we have in the past.