As laundry managers, you must use every
strategy in your linen rental facility to improve productivity, transparency,
and efficiency to deliver incredible value to your
clients.
Fortunately, there are several metrics
at your disposal to ensure that linen rotates throughout the premises to
improve productivity and cut costs—one of the most important ones is the
clean-to-soiled linen factor.
In this post, we reveal how focusing on
this metric can improve linen inventory management for better productivity, efficiency,
and transparency.
What is the clean-to-soiled linen factor?
An underrated metric for linen inventory management, the
clean-to-soiled linen factor measures how much soiled linen is returned by the
customer relative to how much clean linen you delivered.
It is important to note
that the volume is not measured in terms of cleanliness but weight because
soiled linen tends to be heavier than clean linen.
The national average for
clean to soiled linen is between 6-15%. However, this number can change depending
on the industry.
For instance, the
hospitality industry, with organisations such as spas, fitness centres, and
hotels, has an average of 6-8%, while the healthcare industry has a higher rate
of 9-12%, with long-term care facilities having the highest rate, ranging from
13%-15%.
Naturally, the objective
should be to reduce the clean-to-soiled linen ratio by improving the cleaning
and storing process and giving suggestions to the client on how to handle linen
correctly.
Reducing the
clean-to-soiled linen ratio can improve the cleaning and storage process and
increase linen lifespan, which benefits you and your client. Critically, it can
reduce linen loss or mysterious disappearances that occur due to theft, linen
throw-away, and EMS.
Optimising linen inventory management for higher productivity
Measuring the
clean-to-soiled metric over time can provide insights into both your facility’s
and client’s linen management processes. Leveraging this metric can provide a
helpful snapshot into the use and abuse of linen.
Moreover, it can provide
insights into how linen is used by your clients and cleaned by you, providing
valuable feedback on what can be done to improve the treatment and handling of
linen.
Furthermore, it can feed
into other valuable metrics as well, such as linen lifespan, because a high
clean-to-soiled linen ratio could indicate poor management practices.
In addition, managing
linen based on this ratio would give you a competitive advantage.
Due to economic
constraints, clients are relying on their linen rental facilities to provide
expertise on cleaning and returning their linen. They are increasingly
dependent on linen service providers to manage their linen and reduce laundry
costs. Focusing on the soiled-to-clean factor would allow managers to provide
helpful feedback to their clients and make them more valuable.
For example, if the
clean-to-soiled factor increases, you can take a deeper look into what caused
the rise in soiled linen. This upward trend could be due to poor cleaning
processes from your plant or incorrect storage from your client, giving both
you and your client room to improve.
By utilising the
clean-to-soiled factor, laundry processors can enhance value to customers by improving
the quality of laundry operations while reducing costs. Consistent measuring
and monitoring of the metric can also improve business relations between your
facility and your client.
Improving
inventory management to improve returns
With a tightening economy and rising
regulatory standards in the laundry industry, hospitals, nursing facilities,
hotels, and other organisations using large volumes of linen are far more
dependent on their linen rental facilities to deliver more than just clean linen.
They are relying on these organisations
to deliver clever solutions that can help them improve linen management to make
the process smarter and more efficient than before.
Linen rental facilities can rise to the
occasion and provide more value to their clients by investing in a linen
management solution.
These solutions are built with business
intelligence(BI) and automation technology that makes linen management a more
data-driven process and makes it easier to measure different metrics, including
the clean-to-soiled ratio, allowing organisations to optimise linen inventory
management.
