SUPPLIER INNOVATIONS IN A YEAR OF DARKNESS

Larry Stuart, Jr. and the exhibitors and sponsors of CANA’s 103rd Cremation Innovation Convention in Seattle discussed innovative solutions created by CANA Supplier members during the pandemic. These are some highlights from that session.

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Without suppliers, we have nothing. Can I get an amen on that?
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We need these guys to run our businesses, we need these guys to run our businesses well. This is a new session from CANA. And I'm kind of excited about it. It's all about innovation.

FT THE AMERICAS (FACULTATIEVE TECHNOLOGIES)
ERNIE KASSOFF

Did cremations go up during the pandemic? The problem with higher capacity, and even with the dispensation by some of the governors who waived all the environmental capacity limits, is what happens to cremation equipment? It breaks. How do you get it fixed if no one can travel? Keeping the wheels turning in creative ways can be just as important.

FT had to come up with a protocol to keep themselves safe and to keep their customers safe. All of our technicians were vaccinated early. And we had strict instructions from Europe – a five-page document that everybody was required to sign off on. Kelly Vinning and I were back on the road in May of 2020 going out to see customers. We had to do daily reports on what we did to maintain safety, and we have not had anybody contract COVID in our company at all.

It wasn't also just emergency services work – we were able to maintain all of our preventive maintenance schedules throughout. So we did not miss any preventative maintenance from Canada, throughout the US, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. We made every PM on time.

CREMATION SYSTEMS (A DIVISION OF ARMIL CFS)
TOM KROWL

Cremation Systems is a division of Armil CFS which is also an industrial furnace manufacturer. But, during the pandemic, we really didn't have a tremendous amount of the typical casting/forge/heat-treat style business. So, the engineering guys had some time, and we had to occupy their time. We got a call from a disabled veteran of the US Army who had good connections supplying the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He said, “Do you guys think that you could move a retort and building, and put it wherever you want relatively quickly?” And we developed the modular, on-site crematorium – the MOCx™.
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We've had a number of people go to FEMA, but the federal government doesn't do anything very quickly. So we are selling them to independent businesses now. But it showed us some advantages on where it could go, and people are talking to us about it. It'll fit on a small footprint, so putting this on a small space would work quite well. But again, it's ready for that C-word that none of us like to say: COVID.

FUNERAL INNOVATIONS
ALEX MCCRACKEN

We do digital marketing for funeral homes, and as all of you know, when COVID broke out, everybody put their foot on the brake in terms of how they were communicating with their community. People were scared, people were sensitive, people didn't know how to respond to the new reality we were going into.

A lot of our funeral homes were worried about how they're being perceived by the community. How can you go out and have proactive marketing when people are dying? So, we went through Facebook posts and emails and email newsletters and even websites to modify the content to speak sensitively to that. Additionally, we modified content to make sure that we were providing them solutions on how to do grief support or how to contact offices when you can't actually go in or you can't talk to somebody.
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It was a tough time. We are still producing a lot of this content for different parts of the country, like how to grieve from a distance or how to memorialize when you can't have a traditional service. We've throttled back on some of that, but as we see the different waves of this pandemic go on, we'll have to adjust accordingly to what each funeral home really feels like they need to do to relate to their community.

C&J FINANCIAL
JEFF HARBESON

During the pandemic, if any of you tried to process any insurance claims, guess what happened with the insurance companies? They had the same issues that we all did: they had people who were working from home, they were backlogged, and they were doing more cases than they ever had in their history. And so that caused a problem for us that do life insurance assignments. So we came up with a program called Quick Claim.

It really started at the end-user – the funeral director or the providers – where you could literally put the information in in 90 seconds. The complete data would go in, what was returned immediately with us was all the documents you needed to have in order to process that claim for that particular company. So we were able to assign life insurance policies for funeral providers and cremation providers in a much more timely manner than we had done in the past.

PARTING STONE
JUSTIN CROWE

When the pandemic really hit in March, we were about four months into our business. We had built our whole business with this really specific model to empower the funeral homes with the selling tools they needed to sell in-person to families. We had just started to see families really being impacted by having a form of remains they could touch and hold. And then, all of a sudden, families were no longer going into funeral homes and funeral directors were redesigning how they were communicating with families over the phone, over email, over Zoom.

So our innovation is that we built a suite of tools for the funeral directors to use that included affiliate links so that our partners could use our website as a selling tool to educate the families. We created PowerPoint presentations, we did trainings on how to use these tools and communicate with families. By the time those stay-at-home orders lifted in June 2020, our funeral homes started to see increased sales and the families were happy.

CREMATION RECYCLING
JULIE BURN

We don't really have a product innovation, but one of the things that we did do, because it was very important to us, is to develop a webinar that would educate funeral professionals about what actually takes place at post-cremation metal recycling. We have an open-door policy, if you're ever nearby please come and you can view the whole thing.
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I'm very passionate about education. So the purpose of this webinar is to educate every funeral professional about what takes place with metal recycling, because you need to have the correct answers. Somebody in our profession did a YouTube video on what happens if there's gold and says, “well, that all melts, so there's nothing left.” Well, that is incorrect. So again, you need to have the correct information.

MATTHEWS ENVIRONMENTAL SOLUTIONS
ANDREW STRYKOWSKI

We at Matthews saw the double-edged sword of supplies during COVID spikes. The supplies you need are quadrupling and supply chains are breaking down – so the backlog of everything is expanding. Our supply program – the Burn Box – works with the facility. We talk about what caseload you have, what kind of caseload you're expecting to have, what your usage rate is for different supply items, what supply items you use a lot, what you use very little, and we basically break down a shipping schedule for the coming year. So your supplies are showing up right before you need to call and order them again.
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It has been extremely convenient for our customers. Owners and operators know that there's a few things that you need without fail when cremating: your rollers, your temporary cremation containers, utility urns, and your mailers. Having those come on a cycle without you having to think about it means you can dedicate all your time to your families and the million other things happening right now in the cremation space. It really makes life easier for the operator, the crematory managers, and the facilities themselves.

INSIGHT INSTITUTE
GLENDA STANSBURY

We train celebrants all over the world. We have about 4,500 people who've been through celebrant training in the last 20 years. And a lot of us are very actively involved in offering services on a very regular basis. And so, when lockdown happened, I went, “this is going to change how we do service. It's going to change so much about how we reach out to families, and how we talk about death in this time.”

So I just sent out a call to Celebrants, and we brainstormed over a weekend and put together a resource book. if you go through celebrant training, you get a 600-page resource book full of full services. This one was about 40 pages of suggested services, suggested words, suggested ceremonies that you could do that would still be effective on Zoom or from a distance. And we called it Ceremonies to Celebrate Together from Afar. We just put it together, we sent it out, and we said “we want you to have this, we want you to have words.” Because, in my world, words are the most powerful thing we can have.
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We're still having to deal with having services that are unique, different or distanced. We still understand that these times are requiring us to think differently about ceremony and how we do things. So we put this together and have offered it to anybody who wants it. We try so hard to create meaningful things that you can use with your family. So take it, use it, and think of celebrants: Ceremonies to Celebrate Together from Afar.

KYBER COLUMBARIUM & CONSULTING
DEREK MAHER

My business partner, Melanie Turner, actually came up with it. During the pandemic, we had a lot of time to sit and think so we tried to come up with some new ideas. With my background, – being a funeral director, a cemeterian, building niches for almost 20 years now – we’re trying to come up with something for the for the funeral home and the cemetery so that the family sees the value. Simple can be the best thing sometimes, and you don't get much more simple than the Urn Committal Shelf. It goes on and off the front of certain styles of niches, and it just clicks in in less than 10 seconds. The urn sits on there so you have a perfect spot for presentation when you're doing a final committal service. They always look at cremation as the final step but of course, we know that's not the final step. People need to do something with the cremated remains afterwards. This adds to the ability for people to be able to do something like that.

​FULL-CIRCLE AFTERCARE
MATT VAN DRIMMELEN

​WA quick case study: We were helping a lady who was taking care of her husband. As she was helping him out of the tub, she fell and broke her hip right when COVID hit. Her husband was on hospice care and he passed away a few days later. Unfortunately, the intern who was helping report her information reported to social security that she had passed away, not her husband. So, as we start helping with the benefits, we call Social Security, they figure out that they have the wrong death report and they cut off all of her benefits.

Normally, we would need to go and take the death certificate into the Social Security Office, but with everything closed, they couldn't do that. So we reached out to the Senator from Alaska (which is where this lady lived) in Washington D.C., and the next thing I know is the social security administrator from Washington D.C. called my cell phone and said, “I need to get this fixed.” It ended up being a happy story: we got her benefits turned back on.

A lot of our innovation came from helping families and trying to help them work with companies that were shut down or people working from home and they didn't know how to work with their systems. So we helped keep families safe by allowing the family to be at home while Full-Circle deals with all of the companies and government agencies.

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A lot of the suppliers didn't participate in this because we're all busy. Though not everyone did participate, everyone is working their butts off to serve you so that you can serve our families. Follow up with the ideas above and find a full list of Exhibitors at CANA's 103rd Cremation Innovation Convention on the event website: goCANA.org/CANA21
Looking for more? Review the full directory of CANA Supplier Members on the CANA website: goCANA.org/SupplierMembers

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Larry Stuart, Jr. is the Founder of Cremation Strategies and Consulting, and the former President of Crematory Manufacturing & Service, Inc., a leading manufacturer of technologically advanced cremation equipment. Cremation Strategies and Consulting provides expert leadership, planning, organization, training, education, process improvement and strategic planning for the cremation profession. Larry is also a Certified Funeral Celebrant and believes that every life deserves to be honored in celebration remembrance.