Commercial laundries face an age-old challenge: managing linen/garment loss. You can punish customers with extra fees, but it’s more likely you’ll make progress by collaborating with them—particularly in the healthcare space—in pursuing a common goal of conserving resources needed to serve patients.

That was the consensus view we got from several recent interviews with healthcare operators on their approaches to the problem of textile inventory “shrinkage.” Losses typically stem from causes ranging from carelessness to pilfering, hoarding, abuse and—perhaps most importantly—a lax awareness of the fact that linen, uniform and facility services companies can successfully process heavily stained flatwork or ...