As a laundry manager, one of your responsibilities may be to improve commercial laundry services. Improving the quality of your services, however, also means increasing productivity, reducing costs, keeping your clients satisfied, and ensuring employee safety.
This can be a tall order; one that requires a meticulous balance between several business-related operations, which brings us to the next question—how do you take those long-term goals you have planned and convert them into operational KPIs?
In our experience, the best way to improve laundry services is to maximise your ergonomics and commit to ongoing maintenance. Let’s take a look at what this means.
Maximising ergonomics ROI in commercial laundry
Ergonomics, when it comes to commercial laundries, is the study of the commercial laundry floor for details that could compromise worker health and productivity
This aspect of your work covers different areas, like engineering controls (the arrangement of physical items in the workplace), musculoskeletal disorders (conditions that could traumatise the body), and risk factors (workplace elements that could lead to sickness—this is particularly important, considering the risks presented by the COVID-19 pandemic).
Ergonomics is crucial because it creates a more engaged workforce. One way this is accomplished is by creating a more productive workplace through engineering controls, which includes changing equipment, controls, tools, pieces, workstations, and workflows that eliminate or reduce factors that pose a risk to workers and also impact productivity.
Investing in ergonomics also reduces worker absenteeism, which results in higher output.
Due to its effect on worker wellbeing and productivity, it is a significant contributor to ROI. It ensures that any hazards that undermine employee safety and productivity are removed, ensuring continuous financial gain.
It also ensures that you are reducing operating costs by creating a safer workplace. In the long run, it encourages greater engagement among your teams, leading to more satisfied and motivated workers.
All of this leads to better commercial laundry services.
Preventative maintenance is crucial for boosting your ROI
How well things flow in your commercial laundry, from your equipment to your teams, is crucial to your ROI.
In this regard, maintenance operations play a very important role. They determine how often you need to schedule shutdowns for an overhaul and handle supporting functions that allow you to continue your operations without a hitch.
Maintenance tasks fall under three different categories:
Predictive maintenance: Not all maintenance tasks are based on a schedule—they can be determined by other factors, like production methods. This determines where/when maintenance is necessary along with interval sessions.
Preventative maintenance: Maintenance tasks are performed on a scheduled basis. This means looking for warning signs across changing conditions and reducing the number of reactive maintenance tasks.
Reactive maintenance: When your team responds to a breakdown that has slowed or stopped production.
One of the keys to improving ROI is to reduce the number of reactive maintenance incidents to ensure there are no breakdowns or system downtime that affect your output. Predictive and preventative maintenance can reduce the number of reactive incidents, which results in better equipment and smoother operations.
Predictive maintenance is often the difference between “pay for it now” and “pay for it later”, where you are paying a smaller expense now to avoid a bigger cost in the future. A policy that prioritises preventative maintenance can help you maximise ROI because you are reducing the cost of commercial laundry operations.
How can management software optimise your commercial laundry services?
To optimise your service delivery across commercial laundry services, you need to invest in predictive maintenance and maximise ergonomics in the workplace.
This objective can be met when you’re equipped with the right management software.
Commercial laundry software can help you assess your business operations and utilises BI and cloud-based software to assess the state of equipment in real-time. The right software can help you assess both business and technical operations, so you can determine current production levels and even set benchmarks for future production.
You can streamline operations via features like linen tracking to reduce your costs and improve productivity.
Commercial laundry software can help you maximise ROI by giving you the insights you need to schedule maintenance and maximise your ergonomics.