TULSA, Okla. — Laundry operators have many job duties, including hiring, safety, linen purchases, and more.
One of the main duties and often least talked about is the job of looking for bottlenecks in your facility and figuring out how to resolve them.
A bottleneck is any area in a laundry that causes another area to stop producing for any reason.
Properly balancing a laundry so that one department never has to stop for another one can usually be thought out when building a new laundry facility. It becomes a little more complex in older facilities that have either grown in linen produced or because of upgrading machinery in one department or another.
Bottlenecks change from year to year and can change after you fix an existing bottleneck. A new machine to fix a bottleneck can cause a new bottleneck downstream due to the faster processing of goods.
Many bottlenecks don’t have the flashy fix that involves a new production machine. These are usually just accepted or not really seen as bottlenecks.
I’ve seen facilities struggle with water volume delivered to the washroom. Slow fills or running out of water can slow down the wash aisle tremendously, or (create) long steam times due to insufficient steam production. The fix for these issues is usually cheaper than the price of a new washer.
Getting more out of existing machines is always the more economical and easier way to fix bottlenecks.
Many bottlenecks continue simply because they are based on a “gut feeling” a manager has about how things are going. Sometimes getting true numbers gets a response of “I know we do more than that.”
I have created a small list of recommendations that may help you find your bottlenecks and allow you to make better decisions on how to resolve them.
Every area in your plant must be tracked with real numbers. There are several good tracking systems out there, or manually gathering counts has always worked. Assuming an area can produce more than is possible can cause frustration for your production team. You should know all of the following numbers:
- The number of carts your soil department can process per hour.
- The number of soil slings that are coming from your soil department per hour and day.
- How many soil slings can your wash aisle get through per hour?
- How long are your wash formulas? This is not the vendor-given Excel spreadsheets that show the wash steps and drain times. How long do your formulas actually run? This can help you find issues with your wash water being delivered from the boiler room. You may find your wash fill time is slow, or you are steaming in the wash aisle far more than you think. Most chemical vendors provide tracking software to help with this issue. Make sure you track it daily so that when issues occur, they don’t get too far out of hand. Beware of your chemical system slowing your wash aisle down as well. It takes time to inject chemicals; too many washers and not enough chemical pumps can be a real disaster for throughput.
- How many slings must be hung per hour on a rail when they leave your wash aisle? Do you have enough lift capacity to get the slings in the air in a timely fashion?
- How many slings per hour coming from your wash aisle have product that needs to be run through a dryer? How many slings per hour are taken straight to your ironers for finishing?
- How many slings per hour can your dryers process?
- How long do your dryers take to process linen? Tunnel washer manufacturers usually have great software for establishing a baseline for how long each formula takes to run. There is also tracking software available for conventional dryer systems. This is helpful so that you can monitor when you have gone over your baseline. Dryer seals or the dreaded basket debris build-up are usually the cause of extended dry times.
- How many slings per hour can your ironers process?
Here’s a small, theoretical bottleneck exercise for an example. Just keeping numbers simple, if your soil area can produce 20 slings per hour and your wash aisle can produce 15 slings per hour, then you must figure on starting to store five slings per hour or 40 bags in an eight-hour day.
Obviously, my wash aisle is a bottleneck, so I am going to have to wash roughly 2.5 hours more than I run the soil room. Therefore, I need rail space for 40 slings. That’s not a bad ratio at all. I think a lot of us would like those numbers.
But if I don’t like those numbers, I need to look for the fix. Maybe I can purchase a machine to get closer to 20 slings per hour, or I may find that my personnel are not loading/unloading the washers at a good enough pace. Also, if you are not properly weighing your soil slings, you may be losing several loads a day due to underloading your washers. Loading 350 pounds into a 400-pound machine adds up throughout the day.
Do this exercise in every area of your facility. Many times, bottlenecks are more about personnel staffing or equipment issues and less about the numbers your production employees are producing.
Make sure you go into your bottleneck exercise with open eyes and no preconceived thoughts.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
