TULSA, Okla. — Any military veteran is familiar with the term K.I.S.S.
K.I.S.S. stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. The term usually refers to communication on the radio. Don’t get fancy. Just state what needs to be said, nothing more, nothing less.
I think the whole world could use a little K.I.S.S. these days. We sure like to complicate simple situations.
The laundry industry benefits from the K.I.S.S. principles. The best-run laundries seem to keep all their processes simple. No matter how sophisticated the laundry machinery gets, the plant process remains pretty simple, or at least it should stay simple.
It’s been my observation through the years that if you have an issue that you think is unique, you are usually not doing something simple that everyone else is doing.
I know maintenance sometimes tries to turn a simple solution into a huge problem, but it usually turns out to be a pretty simple solution.
An example of keeping it simple recently happened to us.
One of our facilities was having problems with running tablecloths on an ironer. We did what I have seen so many laundries do and that is we overly complicated the issue.
Usually, we start blaming the chemical company, even if the pH seems to be fine. It surely must be something with your chemical even if the tests don’t say that.
Or sometimes we will start in on the ironer representative. It must be your pads, or you are setting the pressure up wrong.
We tried to fix our issue at the 10,000-feet level. Must be something really complicated or unique to us since it won’t run.
We did all the first common-sense fixes. Changed out the steam traps to make sure we have a good consistent temperature on the chest. We made sure all the fingers on the feed table were straight and touching the ironer chest correctly.
Each time we made a change, we would seem to make a little improvement but never really made it right.
So, I decided to work with the maintenance crew in the morning to make sure there wasn’t something we were missing.
We turned the ironer on and got ready to run the cleaning cloth. I stopped maintenance from running the cleaning cloth until we slowed the ironer down. You can’t clean and wax an ironer at production speed.
Crap, we had changed the pulleys to speed up the ironer a while back. We installed an inverter to slow the ironer down for cleaning and waxing but never made it easy to do or told the morning tech the reason why he needed to turn it down. We had been trying to clean and wax the ironer at a breakneck speed which was not giving us the desired effect.
We slowed the ironer down, cleaned and waxed it correctly. Dang, we ran tablecloths for two hours and then ran the wax cloth at the correct speed again at break with no issues. The K.I.S.S. principle was in full effect.
We later preprogrammed a couple of speeds in the inverter and installed a switch to make it easy to turn the speed down to wax the ironer. If something isn’t easy to perform, it won’t get done.
But we had once again proven to Keep It Simple Stupid when you are resolving complicated problems.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
