One of the main duties and often least talked about jobs of laundry operators is looking for bottlenecks in their facility and figuring out how to resolve them. A bottleneck is any area in a laundry that causes another area to stop producing for any reason. Bottlenecks change regularly and can even change after you have fixed an existing bottleneck.
According to some experts, finding the bottlenecks and how to resolve them, is a matter of numbers. Every area in your plant must be tracked with real numbers. There are several good tracking systems and manually gathering counts has always worked. For instance, the following numbers are important to know: the number of carts your soil department can process per hour; the number of soil slings that are coming from your soil department per hour and day; how many soil slings can your wash aisle get through per hour; how long are your wash formulas; how long do your formulas actually run? Make sure you track numbers daily so that when issues occur, they don’t get disastrous.
If you don’t like an outcome, you need to look for a solution or even a new machine. In general, the advice is to know the numbers in every area of your facility. However, bottlenecks may often arise due to personnel staffing or equipment issues and less owing to the numbers your employees are producing. Therefore a vital advice: make sure you do your bottleneck search with open eyes and no assumptions!