The business operates in a rental mode: it owns the linen but offers linen rental and maintenance services. All of its customers are in the hospitality sector: 60% are restaurants and 40% are 4-to-5-star hotels and boutique hotels.
The Challenge
Like many industrial laundries, managing large volumes of linen has its challenges. Repeated manual counting is time-consuming and error prone, often leading to overtime costs and negatively affecting customer satisfaction. Additionally, not knowing what and how many items are in stock increases the risk of having too many or not enough linen to service customers.
But surely the main challenge for the laundry is the high number of linen losses at customer sites and the consequent impact on the reassort budget.
The Solution
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shutting down many businesses in the hospitality industry, Hakimi took advantage of that challenging time to take a leap in the much-needed digital transformation to equip the laundry’s processes and linen stock with RFID technology.
After evaluating a few RFID providers, Hakimi decided on HID for its expertise and cost. HID’s RFID and installation experts performed an on-site analysis of the linen processes and flows to determine what type of RFID equipment would be required and where to position the RFID stations within the laundry cycle.
At each RFID reading point in the laundry, linen data would need to be collected, stored, analyzed, and acted on, in real time. HID’s Acuity linen management platform would provide a comprehensive and real-time overview of linen stocks per zones in the laundry and at the customers’ sites, all through user-friendly, cloud-based dashboards and reports.
Designed in collaboration with experts from the laundry and the hospitality industries, Acuity enables textile professionals to efficiently identify, track, and manage linens and uniforms, while increasing financial gains through reduced operational costs, optimized stock management, and improved customer satisfaction. Acuity leverages the power of RFID-enabled textiles and Software as a Service (SaaS) combined with smart equipment to optimize textile-based operations and flow management.
This “retrofit” operation also implied the insertion and discreet sewing of HID’s LinTRAK RAIN® RFID tags on each piece of linen. The tags’ unique codes mean condition and life cycle can be tracked per item, which is very useful to monitor linen quality, particularly when assigned to high-end customers. LinTRAK tags utilize the latest M700 RFID chip series from Impinj, a long-time partner of HID, to ensure optimal reading performance of all items even in densely packed linen bags or roll-cages.
Designed to withstand repeated washings, detergents, water press extractors and high temperatures, LinTRAK tags look like care labels with a unique electronic identifier and come in various lengths and types (sewn-on or heat-sealable) to adapt to the type of linen they will be affixed to.
Result
Thanks to HID’s RFID system, Les Lavandières can better control the quality of each piece of linen individually and determine when an item is reaching the end of its lifespan so it can be replaced.
Most importantly, the linen data generated by LinTRAK tags and leveraged by ACUITY helps determine whether any quality issues come from the linen manufacturer or the laundry detergent, helping the laundry to take the necessary corrective action. The high-end hotel clients are now better served with a guarantee that the rented linen quality is up to their standards, hence further increasing customer satisfaction.
Les Lavandières is now able to know exactly how many items, and which ones, are at customer sites, in transit and in the laundry (whether in the soil area or on the shelves, ready to be packed and shipped). And, when there is an unusually high rate of linen losses at a specific client site, it is now easy to identify trends and act on corrective actions.
Finally, the automatic count of several hundred items in just a few seconds enabled Lavandières to reduce operational costs as certain zones within the laundry do not require staff to manually count items.
