February 2017

A14 A1-A44 B1-B24

Page A14 FEBRUARY 2017 FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS S ec t i on A
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Gary Finch is a licensed funeral director and embalmer in Texas.
He founded Compliance Plus in 1992. Today, they represent over
700 funeral homes and cemeteries in 37 states. Compliance Plus
also serves as an advisory consultant for the International Order of
the Golden Rule. For more information on Compliance Plus visit
. Contact Gary by phone at (800) 950-
1101 or by e-mail at .
By Gary Finch
OSHA
Compliance
Compliance by Trial and Error
a thumb drive with the program on it. Instead of
thousands of PDF files, there are none. Instead,
there are links to all the major suppliers SDS page.
Once there, they can navigate to whatever prod-
uct they want to access. Each supplier maintains
the list and adds new SDS’s as products are intro-
duced.
Sometimes it feels like we are going in circles.
Sometimes we do but that is okay if it ends up
giving the customer a better mousetrap. For now,
I think we have. There are two caveats. Custom-
ers need to ensure that employees know how to
access and navigate the program. When they can-
not, then print out SDS pages for the products to
which that employee is exposed. You are not re-
quired to print out the entire SDS inventory.
To the typical employee in the death care indus-
try, OSHA is about annual training. To the owner
of the business, it is about an annual fee. To the
regulatory consultant, it is about developing and
presenting safety training, trying to make it more
simple, and trying to accomplish the requirements
without turning the workplace over. If everyone
does their job, then there is a safety benefit, al-
though it is not always apparent.
Two years ago, OSHA adopted a Global Har-
monized System of Chemical Classification. At its
core, businesses gave up the Material Safety Data
Sheet (MSDS) and replaced it with a Safety Data
Sheet. They had their reasons and I don’t question
them. To our customers, it meant replacing a two
page MSDS with an 11 page SDS. That was a real
problem. If a large funeral home used one hundred
embalming products and a dozen industrial prod-
ucts for their car wash, flower shop and monument
shop, the 1100 page SDS binder would approach
the size of an unabridged dictionary.
We felt that called for a better idea. To me,
it meant going to a digital SDS system. I then
checked to see if OSHA would allow our custom-
ers to store SDS pages on a digital system. They
would if the employees knew how to access them. I
emailed or sent a thumb drive of the digital program
my customers. Case closed? Not exactly.
I completed this project two years ago, my SDS
problem was solved. It even brought me calls and
emails thanking me for solving the problem. The
method I used is what prompted all the nice compli-
ments. The method I used turned out to be a prob-
lem. It turned out to be the reason I had to scrap that
system and come up with a Plan B. What was wrong
with Plan A?
In my initial plan, I created a document folder for
every major supplier. If the major supplier catego-
rized products in multiple categories, I used folders
and sub-folders. Then I made a PDF file for every
product. All in all, it was thousands of products and
it easily fit on a 2-gigabyte thumb drive. Contrast
that thumb drive with an 1100 page SDS file and
you can understand why my customers were pleased.
You can understand why we were pleased. But it was
all premature.
A few months ago, I had a computer tech out to
the office for some routine maintenance. I was ex-
plaining the purpose of the program and he asked
me this question. What happens when suppliers add
new products? How are they captured? The answer
was they were not. Try as I might, I could see that the
program had a fatal flaw. The tech and I worked out
a Plan B that would allow customers to access all ex-
isting products as well as new products as they were
introduced.
We are in the process of distributing SDS 2.0 to
our customers. We do that via email or by mailing
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The Millennial Consumer of Funeral Services
What will the needs of the consumer be in the near future? By Shawn’te C.R. Harvell
Shawn’te C.R. Harvell
Millennials are consumers that were born between 1980
and 2000 and are the last generation of the 20th century.
They can best be described as the technology generation
who views the world through the digital lens. As a re-
sult, they seek out organizations that offer services at the
cheapest price with highest customer satisfaction. One
character of this generation has been that they visit retail
shops and then shop online. This behavior has been ad-
opted when seeking funeral services.
Most decisions made by this group are based on infor-
mation received from social media platforms and tech-
nology. To survive in the future of funeral service, busi-
nesses will need to provide less expensive, technology
oriented services.
This generation is characterized by less involvement in
nuclear activities, they make funeral choices that are quite
different from the previous
generation and try to make
the grieving process more
meaningful. This idea of
personalization has result-
ed in the development of
funeral organizations offer-
ing unique services that re-
flect interests, hobbies, and
passions of the person who
died. Thus, funeral servic-
es are no longer a tradition,
but something meaning-
ful to families that contrib-
ute ideas to personalize the
burials of their loved ones.
According to the National Funeral Directors Association, in
the past funeral homes were more dedicated to offering
what they thought was best and consumers had little say.
Satisfying the millennial market requires that the funeral is
adequately preplanned to suit desired service outcomes.
The love of technology by this generation has caused
change in many industries. Businesses have increased
their web presence and involvement in social media, of-
fering and displaying services and products with detailed
information, enabling consumers to make wise decisions,
and use comparisons to get the best deals.
Through the adoption of technology, funeral service orga-
nizations can incorporate or create memorial clips coupled
with photographs accompanied by music (NFDA). Record-
ing the service makes it possible for friends and family mem-
bers who could not attend to participate in the visitation
service. Some funeral homes now offer online streaming to
accommodate those loved ones who cannot make it to the
funeral. These records are utilized by family members who
keep them in archives to utilize in the future.
The millennial consumer is environmentally friendly re-
quiring the delivery of green funeral services (NFDA).
Depending on the needs of consumers, green funerals