The uniform rental industry has long been a hybrid business model. We are not only distributors of other manufacturers' products, but also a service and delivery organization with a production process of our own applied to the items we distribute: laundry. In our laundries, specialized equipment and processes allow us to clean textiles, incorporating economies of scale that benefit the client by performing professional cleaning rather than sending textiles home with employees or trying to wash on-site. Our model involves many moving pieces, with soiled laundry coming in and clean, repaired laundry going back out daily. In my plant alone, we have over 250,000 rented in the field and process over 80,000 pounds of textiles per week.
Inventory control is an integral part of what we do and has a profound effect on our success, not only financially but also in customer satisfaction and retention. People know keeping up with clothes can be a bothersome chore. The most common complaint the industry hears is, "I'm short" (referring to missing clothes, not height).
With this in mind, our industry has developed processes to make the management of laundry easier for both the laundry owner and clientele. The first electronic foray into inventory control for the laundry industry, barcodes, began in the late 1980s. While barcode technology allows for tracking, it has many problems. Due to the nature of laundry, with flexible material often soiled by grime and grease, and detergents and processes designed to clean textiles, barcodes can easily get fouled by industrial settings as well as laundering processes using heat, alkali and various solvents. Also, barcodes require more manual handling to read correctly. The industry realized that, while cost-effective, barcodes are not the solution that would really improve the inventory control issue.
At the turn of the century, radio-frequency identification (RFID) came into play on the laundry scene. RFID tags can be inserted into a pouch attached to the garment, making them more difficult to foul. They also allow for a better read percentage. While first-generation RFID tags are better than barcodes, there remain some vexing issues. First, the chips themselves are encased in hard plastic, which many uniform wearers can feel against their skin, creating a comfort issue. Additionally, this hard casing has a tough time standing up to the agitation, pressure and heat involved in laundry processing before cracking and fouling the antennae, which precludes the use of certain finishing techniques like pressing. Second, these "high-frequency" chips do not emit a strong enough signal to provide multiple reads to the scanner, which causes a great slowdown in the laundry process.
Fast-forward to the present and a new revolution in RFID: ultra-high-frequency (UH-RFID). The latest iteration of the chip has seemed to follow the logic of Moore's law, as the read rate and range over the previous generation has increased exponentially, with more resilient antennae and more flexible media to provide protection against laundry operations. This new generation of RFID has been instrumental in creating the Internet of Things (IoT) considered by many to be the next phase of the technological revolution.
As a business operator and someone who knows the laundry industry well, I realized in 2013 it was time to act on implementing a UH-RFID garment-tracking system for our plant. Fortunately, in 2015, Alsco acquired our laundry, and I was able to get approval for this capital project. The ROI in our case is a 36-month payback on the system with nominal operating cost, which includes the ongoing purchase of chips and the labor to attach them to the textiles. The biggest payback for the system, however, is less tangible than operating costs on a spreadsheet. It is being able to report to customers with a great deal of certainty when a garment comes and goes from our plant, was repaired and what type of repair was performed, and that it was sent to the correct location. With today's data-driven economy, UH-RFID is the only solution that can provide that level of data integration in a business with as many moving parts as ours.
For more information, visit www.alsco.com or call (800) 408-0208.
