Productivity gains of 4% promised, 15% realized.

The challenge

As a national service provider with multiple branches, Cleanlease is always close to its customers, especially hospitals, healthcare institutions and vacation parks. Customers who are good for a varied flow of laundry: approx. 160 tons per week. Cleanlease has been paying attention to production efficiency for some time now.

• Concepts such as Lean Six Sigma provided plenty of inspiration. The question was: how can we improve the performance of the laundry? How can we eliminate waste and maximize capacity utilization?
• Our Laundry Dashboard tool came at the right time with this task. In this branch – and two others – we implemented Laundry Dashboard.

The solution

We implemented Laundry Dashboard at Cleanlease in Goes. This is a smart system to monitor the laundry. The version chosen by Cleanlease mainly provides insight into the productivity of employees.

• We installed so-called subboxes that extract measurement data from the process. The laundry was equipped with touch PCs: employees can log in using RFID tags and register their current task. At various places in the laundry we placed screens on which productivity is visualized, visible for the teams.
• From day one, the branch manager had real-time insight into productivity. What used to be largely based on feeling, was now visible in hard data.
• Together with Cleanlease, we analyzed the information from Laundry Dashboard several times during the first year and looked for optimization possibilities.

The result

We guaranteed Cleanlease a productivity gain of 4% in advance. After the first year, the counter stood at no less than 15%! A year later, the investment in Laundry Dashboard had already more than paid for itself.

Cleanlease’s management and teams had succeeded in significantly improving performance with the help of Laundry Dashboard. The key word here is insight. Cleanlease now has insight into the utilization of machine capacity, the performance of departments and the performance of individual employees. The objective information from Laundry Dashboard makes everyone aware of performance and the possibilities to improve it.