VERSAILLES, Ky. — By now, you’ve probably seen the Super Bowl commercial featuring a 1994 clip from The Today Show. Hosts Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel are perplexed by the concept of the Internet and are even unable to pronounce the “@” symbol.
There’s a comparable analogy—networking—that’s emerged in the laundry industry.
While this concept is still unfamiliar to many on-premises laundry (OPL) managers, I predict it will be common practice in the future.
Just as there were early adopters of the Internet, smartphones, and countless other technologies, more and more laundry operators are seeing the benefits of networking their facility’s laundry room, analyzing machine usage, and giving their distributor access to this information as well.
With the ability to view data that shows machine performance, laundry room efficiency and even employee productivity from any Internet-connected device, networking is evolving how managers do their jobs. As a distributor, being remotely linked to customers’ systems is also improving the quality of support our company can provide to them. We have visibility to quantitative data that allows us to make recommendations to improve efficiency.
VIRTUALLY CONNECTED
While some of our networked customers are heavily involved with analyzing machine performance reports, others solely rely on us as consultants to look at the data and help them make improvements as necessary. Some do a little of both.
A main benefit of being networked to our customer’s laundry operations is that we are able to notify it of issues before personnel there have even realized they’ve occurred. Alternatively, if a customer alerts us of a problem, we can log into its system and begin to troubleshoot immediately, reducing downtime. Depending on the issue, we are frequently able to address it without even visiting the customers’ site. One example occurred just a few months ago, 350 miles away from our office.
A facility in the long-term healthcare industry was suddenly not seeing the wash results it had come to expect from its equipment and wash programs. By logging into the customer’s system through the network, we were able to verify the chemical company had unintentionally adjusted wash formulas while performing routine maintenance.
Without having to make the round trip to visit the site, we were able to rectify the issue and reprogram the machines from our offices. This also prevented the customer from losing money due to downtime and lost productivity. To ensure this doesn’t happen in the future, we now receive e-mail and text message alerts whenever programming is altered—intentionally or unintentionally.
Another networking story is related to staff productivity and procedures. A customer’s chemical company informed us that the linen reject rate in the facility had increased to about 50%, meaning every other item had to be rewashed because the stains were not being removed.
To get to the bottom of the issue, we took a look at the customer’s reports. When studying the facility’s third shift, we saw that staff was selecting incorrect cycles. Workers were throwing everything, no matter the soil level, into machines and running the fastest cycles possible so they could go home earlier.
Items that didn’t get clean would go in the reject bin, causing the customer to lose money due to the extra chemical, utility and labor costs associated with rewash.
Without the technology that allowed us to pinpoint the issue, our customer may still be dealing with the high level of rejects, and unaware it should actually be looking more closely at the staff ’s use of appropriate cycles.
Furthermore, networked machines can send text messages or e-mails to workers and managers when a cycle is finished, when maintenance should be performed, or should any error codes arise to further improve the OPL’s productivity and avoid downtime.
With a productive and efficient operation as the goal, tracking your laundry equipment goes hand in hand with tracking your employees.
Another situation in which networking saved time, money and potentially even more involves another long-term healthcare customer.
We set this facility up with networking and, with our ability to view machine performance reports, found that tumble dryers were giving off a specific error code. Staff was not cleaning lint filters properly, resulting in excessive lint buildup. In fact, it was so excessive that the buildup very well could have caused a dryer fire. Because we were able to view the facility’s report, we were able to apprise the customer of the issue and potentially prevented a tragedy in the year-old, $10 million facility.
LOOKING AHEAD
As these examples show, networking and being wirelessly linked to our laundry customers has a direct effect on the speed and type of service we can provide. As technology evolves, our ability to maintain systems, prevent issues and troubleshoot customers’ laundry equipment only gets better. In turn, our customers are better able to run a safe, productive and efficient laundry operation.
While the majority of our customers do not currently utilize this service, more than 90% have the capabilities, and it’s only a matter of time until more begin to adopt this technology into their operations.
Just as with the Internet, I predict that 20 years from now, we’ll look back on doing business without networking and wonder what we ever did without it.
Missed Part 1? Read it HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].