Commercial laundry operations are complicated ... and often inefficient as a result.
They're full of machines that can break down suddenly and production employees operating at varying levels of productivity.
In a nutshell, commercial laundry plants can be home to islands of inefficiencies that, when you add them all up, have a significant impact on your operation.
Luckily, there are tools to help you along the way, turning those islands of inefficiency into a flourishing and productive archipelago.
Think about your personal life: do you keep track of your family's activities, appointments, etc. better if you commit them to a written or digital calendar? Or do you do better by just trying to make mental notes and hope you remember?
Odds are, the answer is the former. The basic premise there is that you are eliminating a major inefficiency — in this example, human error caused by faulty memory, which leads to missing or being late to various activities — by doing a simple thing.
Simply updating a calendar and checking it regularly, or having a digital calendar send you reminder alerts — helps you reduce human error and better plan your time around these events.
A commercial laundry operation isn't much different. At the end of the day, you need a tool to help optimize your operations and organize your efforts.
In short, that's where commercial laundry software, like Spindle, comes in.
Playing off of the example above, below we'll review some of the ways Spindle commercial laundry management software can help you optimize your operations:
One of the biggest inefficiencies in the commercial laundry environment can be managing your staffing levels. Do you need more people? Are you spending too much on overtime?
These costs add up. However, these are all trackable metrics. With Spindle Workforce, you can reduce your labor costs.
Spindle's automated collection of data in your plant, for one, helps save you the time of manual data collection, which might take you as many as 10-20 hours a week.
Furthermore, real-time data on employee productivity levels throughout the day can help you visualize "opportunities" for improvement by department (flat ironing, soil, dry fold, etc.).
As a manager or supervisor, that means you can be proactive about addressing poorly performing departments or individual employees and work with them to get back on track.
There is an opportunity within an opportunity here: by addressing these problems as they come up, managers and supervisors can sharpen their mentorship skills while fostering a culture of transparency and positive reinforcement. In doing so, you will likely see your employee retention rates improve, not to a happier and more productive workforce.
As we've explained using various analogies elsewhere (car, home, the human body), prevention is key when it comes to your equipment.
Equipment failures will happen, even if you have a robust preventive maintenance program in place. While you might not be able to eliminate 100 percent of all failures, you absolutely can reduce those instances by a significant amount, especially if you don't currently have a good way of tracking the status of your equipment effectiveness and maintenance tasks.
Spindle Equipment Utilization can help you monitor your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and reduce downtime. As we've mentioned elsewhere, unplanned downtime can be particularly costly for your operation, from emergency maintenance costs, lost throughput, labor costs, etc.
With real-time data displayed in a visually intuitive format, you can quickly track your equipment's efficiency and identify if a particular piece of equipment needs to undergo maintenance to avoid a longer-term down period.
Furthermore, with access to the history of any piece of equipment, you can customize your preventive maintenance plan accordingly. Does a particular piece of equipment break down at predictable intervals based on the historical data? Step in and give it some maintenance before it does.
From intake of dirty linens to packout for delivery to the customer, the commercial laundry process has numerous opportunities for productivity-sapping bottlenecks.
To optimize your operation, your goal should be to identify those bottlenecks before they even happen or jump on them quickly before they put significant strain on the rest of the production chain.
Using automated data collection, you can look into common questions, like: Why is my equipment changing classifications so often? Why is the same piece of equipment going down for maintenance over and over again? Is a bottleneck being caused due to equipment malfunction or human error?
Time is money. Every second that goes by with a lingering issue costs you more and more money.
You can be a hero for your operation if you're able to use data to identify bottlenecks and address them quickly.
Speaking of equipment ... do you need another piece of equipment to handle your demand?
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. You have to approach those big-money decisions with data in hand.
Spindle helps you make those assessments. By analyzing and displaying your overall equipment effectiveness and capacity utilization, you can then determine if you need to invest in a new piece of equipment or if you need to be more efficient with what you have.
Just like your home, you always want to keep an eye on your utilities. Are you spending more than they typically do overall? Are there spikes in water or energy usage that might require investigation?
With Spindle, you can have all of that information in one place to help you identify problems before you rack up a hefty water or energy bill.
When usage crosses a specific threshold, Spindle sends you an alert so you can be aware of a potential problem. You can even examine utilities usage down to the machine, which can then inform your maintenance efforts. For example, if one dryer is using significantly more gas than others, that means it might be due for a tune-up.
Bottom line, whether you use Spindle commercial laundry operations software or another provider, you need organized data to optimize your operation. After all, these days it's all about getting the most out of what you've got.
Whether it's your equipment, your workforce or your business strategy, data delivered in real time and in an organized fashion can help you identify and address the inefficiencies that can run rampant if you let them.
When each of the areas above are addressed, you tap into energizing wells of opportunity for your commercial laundry. When done intentionally, these can be like continual cash infusions to your business, without having to make major operational changes. All you're doing is learning how to make your plant as great as it can be.
Take the fight to inefficiencies — they don't have to be a foregone conclusion of running a commercial laundry plant. If anything, they're simply opportunities for growth.
Sign up for a Spindle demo to see how we can help with your commercial laundry optimization goals.
