Behind every great hotel, hospital, catering and manufacturing company is a commercial laundry. Commercial laundry is a huge business, washing tons of linen every day to replenish fresh hotel towels, table cloth, company uniforms and the likes for businesses to continue servicing employees and clients.
But with big operations come challenges. As a consultant for various institutional clients and commercial laundries, I get to hear a lot of problems common across clients. Here I list down three common headaches of commercial laundry and some suggestions on how to solve them.
1. Bad quality wash and finish (especially with today’s water shortage and power outages)
Main causes:
Bad systems; ineffective procedures, practices and machine; and lack of contingency plans to continue operations when faced with challenges with utilities (e.g. lack of water)
Solution:
Revise the wash formula and tailor suit to your laundry’s limitations
2. High cost of producing quality wash and finish
Main causes:
Laundry management does not understand utility costing.
Solution:
Learn the real cost of utilities by asking experts — and know who the real technical experts are. I once talked with a laundry shop owner who said they were discouraged to do dry cleaning services by a supplier since these are generally unprofitable. This is simply not true! Dry cleaning can be profitable if the supplier were only informed about proper utility costing.
3. Rewash of more than 3%
Main causes:
Poor sorting, poor wash formula, poor water, machine overload, poor rinsing, over dry and many more.
Solution:
Training, TQM and ask yourself, “Is it really clean”?
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Of course, these are very general solutions that assume other things constant. If you ever encounter these, I still recommend to look deeper into the problem to find out what is really wrong. Each company will need specific and customized solutions to resolve the root cause of their issues.
If you encounter these challenges or any problems with your commercial laundry, ask help from Romy Apolega by sending him an email via rhapolega@yahoo.com or editor@isitcleanph.com
Featured images courtesy of Hermes Rivera & Jetshoots.com on Unsplash
Cleaning, Sanitation & Laundry 