The Commercial Laundry Manager has a particularly challenging role. Commercial Laundries are exceedingly complex to manage. They are a high volume; labour and capital-intensive businesses; servicing large, demanding, and varied customer bases.
Effective Commercial Laundry Managers have very straight forward objectives. Produce and deliver quality products on time with the lowest possible cost and environmental impact and without hurting anyone. Simple enough right? OK, get on with it.
In this article, we discuss some key areas to address to improve laundry management and to help you identify those important red flags.
Key areas to optimise commercial laundry management
Establish and be dogmatic with your equipment maintenance program.
Equipment up time is a measure that the Plant engineer or Maintenance fitter should be extremely proud of. This is a measure of the relative availability of all plant and equipment. There are two contributing reasons for good results in this key measure: Good Luck or Good Management. Relying on Good Luck is not going to end well for you.
Managing a maintenance program that incorporates scheduled preventative and planned maintenance will significantly reduce equipment downtime due to breakdowns, jams, and stoppages. Equipment lifecycle will be extended, providing better returns on your investment.
Planned and budgeted preventative maintenance will help identify and avoid expensive potential equipment breakdowns and the inevitable loss of productivity. Try adding up all the costs from the lost productivity you have experienced due to equipment breakdowns. Planned preventative maintenance provides peace of mind. Bundle can help.
Manage your linen like your business depends on it. Because it does
Commercial Laundries seldom make money from washing Customer Owned Goods (COG). Today we are Linen Rental Companies. We make our money from renting used textiles. Linen costs will be second only to your labour costs and if not managed wisely, will cause all sorts of grief for you, your staff, and your customer. Without readily available stocks to service your customer needs, your linen rental business is doomed.
Managing your Textiles effectively involves tracking your stock. When this area of the business is professionally managed, you’ll have all the answers: Where is all my stock? What customers have excess stock? Which customers are over ordering with less frequent orders? How long until I need to replace it? How much do I need to inject to cover lost and damaged linen? What do I need to Inject for the upcoming peak period?
TRACK your linen. Manage your customers perception that you care for and place a high value on your Linen. If your customer is of the opinion that you just don’t care about your linen assets, then don’t be surprised when they don’t care either. TRACK your linen with UHF RFID and have all of these answers at your fingertips. Bundle can help.
Train your people with standardised processes and systems
People do not come to work to make mistakes. When mistakes happen, look to the root cause rather than blaming people. As a Commercial Laundry Manager, you own and control the processes that your people use. If your process is failing, improve it and standardise it. Provide standardised systems and processes and measure the outcomes. Take the person out of the problem and make it process.
Every transfer of information has the potential for error. Every piece of paper that you rely on is subject to loss or errors. Standardise the way you receive customer orders. Standardise your packing and route documentation. There should only ever be one way. The best, the easiest and the safest way. The Bundle suite of products is a perfect platform for standardising your processes for your staff and for your customers.
Invest in the right laundry software
We are big proponents of productivity management solutions because they can help you optimise management operations. The right solutions can give you insight into how the commercial laundry is currently performing and analyse data to deliver actionable information in real-time. Put simply, it can give you the perfect foundation to optimise management processes.
The ideal infrastructure can help you examine current processes with data-driven insights to give you sharp, actionable insights. Insights that can give you the perspective you need to make informed changes that will optimise commercial laundry management.