Category: Commercial & On-Premise Laundry

By Scott Pariser
Pariser Industries Inc.

While others who weigh in on this question will likely have better insight into how to best pre-sort and arrange linens in order to maximize washroom efficiency, one often overlooked yet critical component of production efficiency in On-Premise-Laundries, (OPLs) involves maintaining proper linen inventory and its extraordinary impact on a laundry’s ability to produce linen in an effective, timely and cost-effective manner.

Inadequately maintained linen pars in Hospitality and Healthcare facilities make staging, sorting and loading linens to maximize efficiency an impossible task.

Too often, physical inventories of linens that I have participated in have revealed par levels on certain daily use items at less than One Par. A Par of linen, in this case, is defined as “The Total Use of an individual linen item consumed by a resident/guest per daily period”. (not, “One such item per person per day”).

In the scenario described above, some items are required to be washed more than once per day and re-distributed to the respective rooms in order to prevent a critical run-out of linen at point of use. At the laundry level, this condition requires the laundry to process what it has in the soil room immediately as it is received, and often mixed with other classifications that should be sorted separately in order to fill washers to capacity, or it forces operators to run partial loads to get the work processed and back up to the floors.

Therefore, some items will either be washed longer or harder than necessary, increasing costs and decreasing linen life, or the washer will be under-loaded, resulting in wasted time, energy and labor.

In order to run an efficient and effective laundry operation in an OPL, linen levels must be such that the laundry is washing linen today for tomorrow’s use at the very least. (Most Departments of Health actually require “Three Par” linen levels to be in circulation, and while this may not be feasible for some facilities because of cash-flow or space considerations, Two Par is a likely MINIMUM threshold for each item’s inventory control).

With proper linen par levels in circulation, the laundry operation can stage its daily requirements appropriately, wash all like items together on the best-suited wash formulae, dry each item only the appropriate amount of time, and thereby effectively and efficiently process each day’s linen requirements with the least amount of related expenses (and STRESS) possible.

By Scott Pariser

Pariser Industries, Inc.

Benchmarking and tracking operational data is key to proper laundry management. National statistics, although not always a definitive goal for each and every laundry operation, can serve at a minimum as a guideline for managerial reference points in terms of laundry overview.

Even if national statistical benchmarks are unavailable to a laundry manager for comparison, tracking operational data from week to week, or longer period to period, enables one to establish a feel for individual operational production level norms, so that variations to the norm, up or down in the future, can be observed, evaluated and learned from. For example, why have our resulting statistics changed negatively from one period to another, or what happened positively speaking, when we made what we hoped was a beneficial operational change over the most recent period?

Specific data that has proven beneficial to operation management over time has included, but is not limited to the following:

• Pounds of clean linen produced per period
• Pounds of Rewash as a % of total production
• Rag-Out (Linen that is not reclaimable) as a % of clean linen produced
• Pounds of Linen Processed Per Operator Hour
• Labor cost in $/Operator Hour
• Utility Costs (if able to be determined) as $/LB clean linen produced
• Linen Replacement in $/LB
• Total cost to produce a lb of clean linen
• Hours worked without a lost time accident

By tracking the above data, and either comparing these numbers to other “similar” operations or simply monitoring same after operational modifications are made, the laundry manager can more effectively manage and direct the successful outcome of their individual operations.