CHICAGO — Recent advancements in laundry technology offer operators a range of solutions, but it’s essential to identify those solutions/answers that deliver the fastest return on investment (ROI).
Clean 2025 in Orlando showcased innovative technologies, prompting consideration of factors such as financial impact, spatial requirements, capacity, revenue, expenses, ROI, and profitability.
In other words, “What’s going to give me the biggest bang for my buck?”
Modern technology enables improved performance tracking, productivity optimization and labor-cost control. We have data to improve profitability, to improve our bottom line.
Over the past decade, the laundry industry has experienced significant technological progress. To begin adopting new solutions, operators should assess plant pain points, such as labor, energy consumption, and downtime.
What’s your largest expense? What’s the benchmark in our industry for this expense? How does your laundry relate to that benchmark? What can we do to improve this measure?
Start with incremental, or small, changes. Defining clear goals and ROI is critical.
CONNECTED EQUIPMENT
Connected equipment (both physically and through communication) and IoT (Internet of Things) solutions provide valuable performance data, enabling managers to identify areas for improvement.
We need to collaborate with vendors for training and support. All of our equipment vendors have software that connects with other pieces of equipment. Find out what’s out there from your equipment supplier. Every supplier has a partner with these communication tools.
This is a way to maximize productivity through our equipment and balance our laundry systems throughout the entire plant. Balancing should be done for the soil, washroom, finishing and pack-out departments.
If we can process 10,000 pounds per hour through our soil department but can only process 5,000 pounds through our washroom, then we will have a backup of laundry that will cause delays in our production. We should be able to see on computer screens how our production workflow is progressing in real time.
With today’s technology, we should be able to see pounds of products being processed by the hour through soil, through the washroom, through our finishing department (ironers, folders, garment tunnels and mat rollers), and finally through our pack-out department.
This information can be shared by suppliers and should be known by our laundry management teams. This is sharing information; therefore, the costs should be minimized.
INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE
Intelligent software, including dashboards for machine and employee performance, supports real-time labor scheduling and expense reduction. The integration of automation, smart software and skilled teams will create more efficient workflows.
There are at least five good production data collection software systems in our laundry industry today. The production data is out there.
The two key performance indicators that can be considered lead measures are the productivity levels of our employees and the idle time (non-performance time) of our production employees.
Fair and accurate standards should be established, and as employees produce, the production should equate earned hours. These hours are compared to payroll hours, which equals productivity levels.
Our first goal is to have 100% productivity levels as an average for all of our employees. This information should be automatically collected from our intelligent software. We should know this productivity level in real time and evaluate this information every hour.
The second automatically collected labor performance measure is our idle time (or daywork, as we old-timers called it). We will always have idle time; however, we need to measure it and control how much we have. Our goal is to keep our idle time at 5% or less of our total payroll hours.
Again, this idle-time data can automatically be collected using production data collection software. My advice is to automatically collect this data (information) but keep it simple.
Pounds processed per hour, or pounds per operator hour (PPOH), is our key metric. If you aren’t automatically collecting this measurement, then you are overspending on labor expenses. Production management should know this information every hour.
Aren’t we producing soil pounds every hour? Aren’t we producing wash pounds every hour? Aren’t we producing pounds through our ironers, folders, garment finishing equipment and mat rollers every hour? Aren’t we packing out linen, garments and mats every hour?
This is how we generate revenue, so shouldn’t we know, through technology, how and when are products are being produced?
Labor is still our No. 1 laundry expense, and I haven’t seen anyone with total control of it. If you’re out there, then let me know and let’s talk. If there is a laundry with great production labor understanding and controls out there, then I will write another article, and you will be the subject. The way I see it, our production leadership had a better handle on production labor measures 20 years ago than we do today.
SILVER BULLET: DATA
Transitioning from manual to automated data collection enables real-time performance monitoring and labor optimization. As labor improves, our PPOH increases. When PPOH increases, this decreases our expense percentage, which provides more profit.
This raises a good point. What good is automation if we don’t know how to use it to improve? In laundries, we’re always looking for the “silver bullet” to improve our P&Ls (profit and loss statements). We have the silver bullet, and it is our data.
Technology will provide even more data than we have today. It’s up to our laundry industry to figure out how we’ll use all of this data to improve. As noted previously in many laundry messages, “Someone without data just has an opinion.”
Click HERE to read part 1 about examining robotics and artificial intelligence, along with immediate tech improvements in RFID.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
