Episode 23 – Productivity Boost

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

We’re back once again with the linen, uniform, and Facility Services Podcast, Interviews and Insights by TRSA. I’m your host, Jason Risley. Thanks again to everybody tuning in whether you’re listening in your office, in the car, at home, or elsewhere. If you have any comments about the show, send an email to podcasts attrsa.org. In today’s episode, we’ll take a look at plant productivity and how to improve your laundry’s throughput through better hiring practices for production staff, new technologies, and more.

 

Weighing in on this topic will be Johanna Ames, president of Ames Linen Service, Tyler Burke, executive vice president of Loop Linen Service, and Mike Chambers, production specialist at ALSCO Inc. Don Maeda, a senior consultant at TBR Associates, moderated the panel presentation, which took place at TRSA’s production summit and plant tours in October in Las Vegas. The Production Summit was held the same week as TRSAs Maintenance Management Institute or MMI. In addition to industry education and networking, both Production Summit and MMI attendees toured the laundry facilities of Brady Linen Services and Nevada Linen Supply. Without further ado, let’s listen in and glean some insights from these laundry operators on how to improve plant productivity.

 

The first question is, what are you each doing that’s different now? And and if people aren’t there, it doesn’t matter what efficiencies you’re trying to measure because if you can’t get them there and keep them there, you’re not gonna have much of a platform. So, Tyler, what are you doing? We started doing more employee appreciation, you know, cookout, crawfish boils. You know, we do the tailgate before the Saint season starts big football city.

 

We also started, you know, offering, and it sounds crazy, direct deposit to our plant employees. But then took it a step further once we realized they weren’t taking advantage of it by getting them set up with a credit union. These people didn’t even have bank accounts. So, you know, we’re getting them started with bank accounts and, you know, having debit cards and just doing different things to engage the employee with Luke Lennon. And you’re also, did do you have apps for their phones for their paychecks too?

 

No. We’re not there yet. Okay. We just rolled this, the, credit union about October 1st, actually. So we’re only a couple weeks in it and we only have 4 people, 4 employees that are not taking advantage with we want a 100% hopefully by the end of the month.

 

Okay. Hey, Michael. You know, it’s a different environment we work in today. People we try to employ are different than what we had grown up with in this industry. So it’s not the same type of mentality as how you deal with folks.

 

It’s very critical that, you know, first of all, you make them feel welcome. Our company has done that. We, assign someone a mentor as they come in, to kinda get them acclimated to what is expected. You know, give them the progression of what we would like to see them do, you know. But one of the biggest things, obviously, and, Tyler, you can say this morning, anybody else, New Orleans is a hot city.

 

A lot of our plants are in hot areas. So we have started doing evaporative coolers. We’ve tried to reason through that, spot cooling in different locations. So anything you can do to, make them feel more comfortable in their job. Also, we have the, plant managers counsel with them on their 1st day.

 

Hey. So and so. How did it go today? You okay? Is there anything I can do to help you?

 

You don’t just put people out there and ignore them. And I think in in the past, our industry has done that. So we’re trying to change some of those cultures. Thank you. Efficiency measurements.

 

While technologies abound and technologies are changing, what formats are you currently utilizing in your plants for measuring efficiency? What what are you driving the department efficiencies with? Is it budget dollars or throughput? Tyler? We’re focusing on throughput.

 

We’re we have a growth strategy, in revenue growth strategy, but our plant, you know, we are landlocked. So, we’re just trying to drill down on being more efficient in the same footprint that we have without extending hours of operation. Joanna. So we’re trying to keep it simple. We’re I would say both is the answer to your question.

 

Right? But throughput, of course. Although, I see overall a dramatic decline in the in the throughput now compared to 18 years ago when I started, just the ability of our production associates to produce, right, so I just still I try to go back to the basics, keep it as simple as we can, keep our recording mechanisms as simple as we can. It’s red and it’s green. You made it, you didn’t make it.

 

What are we doing wrong, and how are we gonna fix it? Help you fix it. It? I agree with Joanna. I think, you know, first thing you have to do is make the people aware of what their expectations are for their for their particular jobs.

 

It’s definitely throughput, but how do you get that? Best portion of my presentation is how do you improve the productivity. I think that every person comes to work every day with a full accept or full expectations of doing a good job. I don’t think they come in and say, I wanna mess the company up today. I’m not gonna do anything.

 

But, you know, I think as you get into this, you have to really look and assess each individual job that these people do. Is there something we as a company are not providing them? For instance, if the table cloth iron drops table cloths all day long, do you really think the operators are gonna make your production numbers? Answer is no. I was speaking to someone earlier, I think it’s Tom.

 

I spoke to Tom a little earlier. He asked me that same question. Well, the question is, you go out and evaluate the piece of equipment, and make the best decisions, and correct the problems. We always say remove the barriers. Right?

 

Let them feed, increase their contact time. It’s our job to do everything else. Right. Right? Yes.

 

You You know, one of the things is, a lot of plants most plants do collect data. So my question for the panel was, what are you doing with your data, Tyler? We’re recording it. We’re posting it hourly. We’re, we’re testing out a a counter now.

 

It’s only about 2 weeks into it. So we’re just collecting it and analyzing it. So we’d have real time feedback for the operators, either counters right at their workstation or red light, green light, which is really my preferred method. And on all of our finishing sides, we’re working on better maintenance of our hourly production postings. We had a daily production posting culture and we realized that wasn’t frequent enough with the turnover employees that we’re seeing now.

 

So we’ve shifted to hourly and getting our, group leaders to do a better job with that, and then of course there’s weekly production reports and management around those weekly numbers. Michael. I believe in tools. I want to say it upfront. I think that you have to provide the plant managers and their supervisors the correct information to make good decisions.

 

But by the same token, a system does not make a bad plant manager better. Okay. What I mean by that is they have to understand the information that they’re given, and they’ve got to act on that. They just can’t, say, well, the numbers said that you were at 50% efficiency. Again, I believe in evaluating situations and encouraging people rather than making it a penalty reward system.

 

Thank you. Next question. Upgrading equipment. Everybody’s favorite topic. So what drives your thought processes, folks?

 

Increasing throughput? Reducing staff? How about utilities? Tyler? Just a little bit of everything.

 

Like I mentioned, throughput is really the main goal. We do like to we would like to reduce staff but, you know, with that revenue growth strategy, it’s as we’re growing, you can’t really reduce the staff. Especially with the trying to get people on board. It’s difficult already. So the last thing we wanna do is to push them out the door.

 

So in increasing throughput is always our main focus. Joanna? My answer is both again or all, just like Tyler. All of the above. It’s all of the above.

 

We’re doing a lot on the throughput side working with Don and his team on some of our lean kind of 6 sigma projects that we’re doing, But quite frankly, if I could find the people, right, I’d love to reduce people. Right now, we need more people. So it’s both. And I think the other part of it is when we’re making capital decisions now, we’re looking at much longer ROI. Right?

 

Whereas 2 years for me was a long number, 10 years ago, 6 years for me now might not be a long number in the in the environment in which we’re working with the cost of the labor and the mandated increases. Right? Yep. So I’ll look at I’ll look at much longer returns than I would have before if I think it will benefit us. Yep.

 

I think we all been to The Clean Show. Right? It’s nice to go around and look at all the equipment that’s there. You know, my primary role when I was there was to kind of evaluate what equipment is out there that is gonna actually eliminate people. Okay.

 

What I mean by that is I’m a just give you the example. No no names, but there’s a towel folder that actually picked up the towel, fed it through the machine, and folded it. There was no employees whatsoever involved. I think as we get into this, that’s the key. You know, you’ve got to have throughput in your facility or through your facility, but you’ve got to kind of offset some of those hiring problems that we have.

 

So I think throughput is the issue, but I not only reducing people, but eliminating the need to have them. Okay. And finally, on equipment, when you do replace equipment, are you expecting growth out of that equipment or you wanna maintain present levels? So which one is it? We’re expecting growth.

 

You know, we try to keep up with our equipment the best we can. We have something similar to Caleb, that he showed on our preventive maintenance. Well, his was lockout tagout. Ours is very similar. It has all the PMs on it.

 

But if you open up the binder, it has all the lockout tag out. So really just maintaining the equipment in order to, you know, invest in new equipment to get a better return on it. I I don’t wanna buy and only sustain. I wanna buy and allow for some growth, right, when I make that purchase. I wanna invest as much, wisely as I can, and I wanna take really good care of it so I can maximize the life out of the equipment.

 

Most people, when they evaluate equipment, they don’t really look at the longevity of what they really need to do. And the issue is, yes, it’s growth. That’s what keeps us all employed, is growth. But secondarily, what do we do to forecast that growth? What How do you know what you need?

 

Plants have got to understand how to man it, staff a plant, and then make the decisions on what equipment to buy based on footprint of your plant and also, again, with the type of equipment that you buy. Thanks. And the last question, and this was a unanimous one when we all spoke together, was on maintenance efficiencies. Maintenance efficiencies, without them, they will kill your production efficiencies. So how do you all measure your maintenance efficiencies?

 

Are you using what kind of tools are you using to maintain those efficiencies? Well, just like I said, we have PM books on all of our equipment. It goes, you know, from weekly to monthly to quarterly to semi annually and annually, and you know, it breaks down everything that needs to be done on that piece of equipment, you know, from the manufacturer. We also have added some things over the years that we feel fit and just really just keeping up with the equipment is what we really try to do. Especially with maintenance people, we’ve turned over our maintenance department twice, within the past year.

 

Got a phone call on the last break that, you know, Frank quit, which was another maintenance guy. So just really keeping the equipment going is a top priority for us. A huge challenge for our industry, right, sourcing, I call them unicorns. I found a unicorn in January, and I do a lot to keep him happy right now. No, but really beyond that, what do we do?

 

Our goal is to know the equipment better than the manufacturers do, right? That’s where we wanna be and we wanna maintain it aggressively. It’s hard to do that when we can’t find enough hands to do that. Right? That makes it tough.

 

And then we do measure downtime. We we have literally downtime recorders on all of our big pieces of equipment, and we manage that and take a look at trends and patterns every week. I think the companies, basically, in the long run have ignored the maintenance piece of it in a lot of cases. As Don said earlier, there’s nothing more important than having the equipment that runs. I can make all the plans in the world to staff the facility, but if the equipment doesn’t run, you’ve gained nothing.

 

So I think that is an emphasis that, we’re placing on our in our company is more on hiring and getting the right people in the right positions. I don’t think there’s very many people out there that know what a laundry is the way it seems now. You know, so maybe you have to go to different avenues to pull these people in trade schools and things like that. And I think you’ve got to encourage them as you bring them in. They’re just like the hourly associates.

 

They’ve got to know what they’re doing well, and they’ve got to know when they’re not. You know, can I make one more comment too? I think we have to work really hard at partnership between production and maintenance, not letting it become this, right, with the 2, and also encouraging our production associates to report the unusual noises, the clunking, the the chain that’s knocking against the side of the cabinet. Right? Yeah.

 

Recognize clunking, the the chain that’s knocking against the side of the cabinet. Right? Yeah. Recognizing that that’s wrong. Yeah.

 

And then for your maintenance technician to be receptive to that feedback or your production manager to make sure that he or she is receptive to that feedback. Right? I think we miss a lot because our production associates assume, oh, it’s been doing that since the day I got here, not realizing that’s wrong. Yeah. Right?

 

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And, last one before I turn this over to Joanna is do you measure your utility efficiency? Oh, absolutely.

 

Water, which is a big utility. It keeps rising. We have very cheap water in New Orleans, but we still measure it. Electricity and gas, you know, the 3 three big ones. So that’s the 3 we constantly are looking at.

 

And daily meter reads and then, weekly, relativity. Right? How many kilowatt hours per pound did we produce. Right? Just to make sure our trends are in line.

 

Data’s king. You’ve got to know where your plan is. You gotta know what they’re doing. Sometimes these indicators per pounds per operator hour and utilities per operator hour indicate there’s a problem, and it may not necessarily be the hourly associate. Okay?

 

It’s stuff that’s happening in your operation that you just are not aware of. So, yes, that’s very important to track that. Okay. Thank you. Each for the balance before we get to the question session, each one of the panelists prepared, a brief presentation on what they think is key to efficiencies and heading into technology.

 

So I am gonna turn this over to Joanna. So I left you in suspense before and my answer is food. A lot of food. Cupcakes, pizza, you name it. No.

 

We do feed a lot. That’s not all we do. So it’s kind of interesting because I think how we’re gonna play this is I felt before we even talk about onboarding employees, we gotta talk about how we source them and and then how we train them and bring them into our culture. And I think you’re gonna talk a bit from there about how do we staff it. Right?

 

And then you’re gonna talk about some interesting technology to hopefully help increase the throughput. Right? So kind of a neat progression that we’ve set up here. So, so for me, I think it’s important to say before you onboard them, you gotta find them. And for us, I don’t think we’re different than any of the rest of you in what you’re dealing with, but I’ll just share.

 

I mean, this is the worst labor market that I’ve seen in my entire career. I’ve been in the business going on 19 years. It’s huge. The challenges are just huge, really tight market. The quality and the caliber of the candidates that we see coming in is unlike anything I’ve seen in my entire career.

 

And we finally struck on something a couple weeks ago, and what we realized is that for our population, their life issues and the life choices that they make are so significant that it gets in the way of work. Right? And we used to say, okay, we’ll know all the resources in the community. We’ll be that extra arm, you know, when they need help with rent or they have an emergency with their utilities. And now we’re finding that there are so many flags in this workforce that we can’t keep up with getting them all the resources they need.

 

The other part that’s interesting is that, at least in our community, the market demand supersedes the need to stick to a job. So we can do a whole lot on bringing them on board and training them and showing the environment, but, you know, 2 weeks in, if they think, oh, this isn’t for me, they could go tomorrow next door to the bottling plant. Right? And try that for another 2 weeks, and then go on and on. Unlike anything we’ve seen.

 

I don’t think it’s different. Right? I’m sure many of you are facing some of these same challenges. Yeah. So so here are a few, hopefully, some take homes for you that we’ve come up with.

 

I you know, honestly, the jury’s out on whether some of them are effective or not, but what have we done? And the interview process, we’ve extended it. We used to bring them into plant and tour them around, you know, maybe 15, 20 minutes. We’re now at it’s about an hour, hour and a half process. We literally bring them in, leave them alone in each department.

 

Don’t work, but talk to the people. Right? Understand. See it, smell it, feel it. Right?

 

Especially in July. We’re in an HR conference here with T RSA, or Dallas, T RSA in April, Dick Finnegan. It was a great presentation. And he said, your interview process should smack the senses. He’s not kidding.

 

So we literally we have him stand right there, feel the heat. Do you feel the heat coming off of the iron or stand in the soil sore line? Do you smell we do health care. Do you smell the health care soil sore coming through here? You know?

 

And then we say, look, we’re gonna invest a lot in you, so we would just rather know now. If you’re not gonna be interested in this job in the long run, no harm, no foul. Tell me now and and let’s move on. Right? At least trying to instill a little bit of of responsibility or guilt maybe with them.

 

We do have some other, tactical things, like, we do pay referral bonuses, both at hire and then at 6 months, trying to get our existing employees to help. We have mentoring programs. We do feed the living heck out of everybody. There’s food all the time. And then on top of that, keep it a clean, safe environment.

 

Right? Well lit, eat off of my floors and my plant any day of the week. Right? That’s the goal. And hopefully, just be nice to each other.

 

We talk a lot about being kind. So pipeline management, for me, this became a major shift in the last year. We’re small. I have 85 employees. I don’t have an HR person.

 

So the burden of managing that pipeline, the kind of the Indeed or the on online job application process, it was too much. It was taking all of our managers just so much time that they weren’t able to focus on throughput and other issues in the plant. So we finally decided to hire a recruiter. I have a guy that gives me roughly 10 to 15 hours a week, and he’s now taking care of the email screens, phone screens, scheduling interviews, basic reference checks, and and then I fed him with a skills profile that I’ll show you next. And so while the outcome is still tumultuous in terms of no show rates are still high, you know, we’re saying try you know, higher 5, maybe we’ll keep 2, and that’s if they show up for the interviews.

 

We’re triple booking interviews still. But at least the burden of the pipeline management piece has been shifted from our management team to another kind of an, you know, relief valve for us. So so it’s worked, in that sense. We don’t need to get into details, but what I realized dealing with a recruiter who wasn’t familiar with our industry, I had to fill out some sort of a matrix and give him a profile. So we built profiles for production, for route service, and for maintenance, kinda giving them yes, no, and maybes of personal characteristics, work histories, earnings histories, you know, and all that good stuff.

 

Another idea that we have come up with, and this is new, we we have not implemented. We’re in the process of creating now, but I thought it was an a good one to share. So New York State and other states, we’re looking at rising wage rates, right, we’re on the push for $15 an hour, we’ve gone up 7% each of the last 2 years, we’ll go up again in January. So our thoughts are are starting to focus around how can we upgrade the personnel in our plans ahead of that schedule. Right?

 

And maybe we can drive more value if we can upgrade and bring a stronger quality production associate into the fold before we get there. And it’s hard. And Don has to keep reminding me of this because I think $15 an hour, you know, I I don’t wanna pay him $15 an hour. He shows up, you know, every 3rd day. You know?

 

And what Don reminds me is, no, this is the whole point. If we can push to get to a higher quality production associate ahead of the curve, shouldn’t we be able to also increase our throughput. Right? But it’s a leap to get there. So what we are working on now, we, for a 100 years, had productivity incentives.

 

Right? If you made rate, you got so much more per hour. Different by department, whether it’s group or it’s individual. So we are getting ready to ditch that entire program and move to a tiered model where if you bring more value, you’ll earn more money. Right?

 

So we used to always do that with packers. Right? People with more responsibilities would get more per hour. But our production associates, it was up to them to earn it. So now we’re going to something like a level system like I have up here.

 

So if you come in, you’re entry level, you can make, rate, and follow your SOPs in one department, you’re kinda here. Right? You go to 2 departments, you can earn a raise to here. 3, 4, and up the chain. And we’re hoping that if we can implement this model, maybe we can stay ahead of the wage rates a little bit, escalate a little a little faster, but increase our PPOH at the same time.

 

So and there is there are some other laundries that are already on that path and are finding some success with it. So, so I wanted to share with you. It’s it’s not a slam dunk, and I still mentally have to get over the, I can’t pay them that, right, it’s it’s a really hard leap, but we’ve got to get to a higher throughput, right, in the plant with a better quality associate. Okay, and then finally, so we talked a little bit about if we can find them, all that good stuff, and then I wanted to talk a bit about differences between orientation and onboarding because I think we all fall into this, oh, you know, give them all their safety training and throw them out on the floor. There was a recent Gallup poll that said that 12% only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a good job of onboarding.

 

Right? I’m sure we if if I ask you, you probably would all raise your hands and say, yeah, we could do a better job. We sir we certainly can too. But important to distinguish between orientation, where we’re talking about pay periods and vacations and break times and all that good stuff, and things that mentors, we also assign mentors, can handle, you know, versus onboarding, which is so much more than that. Right?

 

It’s how you do the job, but it’s also what is our culture, and, and how are we gonna make them understand what it’s like to really be here and feel rewarded to be here. So so just a few observations. For us on the mentor side, one trick that’s worked well for us is their number one job is to make sure that their new hires don’t sit alone at the lunch table. Right? So until that person says to you, hey, I’m good, or hey, I wanna go whatever run my errands at lunch, your job is to make sure they don’t feel alone and they know where the bathrooms are and they have somebody they can ask kind of simple questions to.

 

Right? And then on the onboarding side, my observations are that in general, it’s been a much shorter timeline than historically. We used to say 4 weeks. You know? And day 1, we’d throw them to health care soil sort.

 

It was kinda like throwing them to the wolves. And if they made it through, then we knew they’d make it through the rest of the plan. Well, now we don’t do that. Now we put more weight to allocating, hey, hey, hey, which department do you think you like? And we’ll start them there and hope that we can retain from there.

 

And we work really hard on daily interaction and multiple touch points through the days with our plant supervisor and our plant manager. We do have department specific training checklists that we use to get to the how to do the job part, but I wanna mimic what I think Tyler’s doing which is some real life some training videos, you know, taken in our plants that that will explain it better. And then I thought I would just share with you. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Earl c Winters, so he’s long since gone, both on this earth and from our industry. But I was taught the old Earl c Winters production methods, and and I’ve pulled out a few of what I thought some of his his key kernels were that are important when you are training and onboarding an employee.

 

So number 1, never stop teaching. Right? You’re walking through the plants. Never stop teaching your people. Every detail, every job.

 

Simplify as much as you can. If you don’t show them, how are they to know? Right? And I think we lose sight of that, particularly when it’s July and you’re at peak poundage, and you got 5 new people that started today. And, but if we don’t teach them how to feed the napkin, how are they gonna know?

 

Because we can’t let the blind lead the blind, which is number 6, you know. And don’t ever be, don’t allow them to invent their own best way, that’s why we have to manage the details. Don’t be too busy to explain exactly how you want the job done or you’re just always gonna be disappointed. So I I love Earl, I don’t know if others have have found or heard of him in the past, but, but I think it’s still true, you know, he wrote the book in 1984, but many of those tenets are still, applicable today, if you can get over some of the language that he uses, so. Another input another tactic that we’ve used is stay interviews.

 

This also came out of the HR the summit in April, workforce management summit. So Dick Finnegan was the speaker and he really stressed that this is an important concept for retention at all levels. So what did we do? We’ve implemented it for all new hires, all departments. We do it at the 3 week mark from hire thinking they’ve gotten over if they’ve made it past the 2 week mark, we’re probably doing okay by week 3.

 

We have very programmed and consistent questions, so regardless of the department that they’re in, they’re getting the same 6 questions asked. And it just it it promotes some dialogue with the new employee. What do you like? What don’t you like? What could we do to make it better for you?

 

Sometimes there are very simple barriers that we can remove that we just didn’t realize. And at the bottom is a very prescribed action plan for direct follow-up from our managers. And then we have a commitment that everyone on the senior team reviews it within 20 hours of completion. So we have the chance to go back and provide some feedback to that employee. Yeah.

 

So, we just started implementing this. It’s probably been 2 2 months, I guess. And we’ve gotten some really great feedback, and we’ve been able to make some changes, simple things that make a difference to our employees. So Now for a brief message from TRSA. Network and collaborate with the linen uniform and facility services marketing and sales leadership at TRSA’s second annual marketing and sales summit on December 4th 5th in Tampa, Florida.

 

Get the tools and approach necessary to create higher level and more persuasive engagements during an overview on emotional intelligence with keynote speaker, Joel Landy, who is the best selling author and founder of The Performance Group. Landy has more than 25 years of experience coaching leaders and top teams to resolve conflicts, map strategic initiatives, optimize business operations, and radically increase engagements through improving emotional intelligence. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of his book, rewired, power up your performance, relationships, and purpose. Sessions that will benefit all attendees include a facilitated great ideas story swap, sales marketing and the digital world, strategic partnership, serving your customer’s customer, operator panel on the state of the markets, f and b, health care, hospitality, and industrial. Opportunities for networking include a 5 PM reception on Wednesday, December 4th, and a closing event at Busch Gardens Tampa from 5 to 8 PM on Thursday, December 5th.

 

Gather with marketing and sales professionals to reinforce and gain new skills whether for yourself or as a way to reward and retain valued employees. Learn more and register now at www.trsa.org/marketingsummit. Now back to the episode. Okay. So you already seen my first screen.

 

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. Alright. I wanna take you back to a time when you first walked into your first laundry. Well, mine was this. I was an industrial engineer, came from another industry, and I walked in.

 

And my first thought was, how in the heck do you get all that crap out of that plant and through that plant? Right? So with that being said, I think the, the the phrase I’m looking for is necessity is a mother of invention, and that’s kind of what I’m gonna show you in my next slide. What I have here is a staffing model. Alright.

 

I’m an analytical person. I believe that you have to analyze everything that you you do in the plant. You know, as as Joanna said, she’s gonna show you how to hire the people. My side of it, I can’t do anything without Joanna and her her her comments. It’s critical.

 

I can’t say that enough. It’s critical to retain your people. Alright? With my information, I looked at this, and I said, well, look. First of all first of all, you gotta know the sales volume.

 

For this example, this plant runs $210,000, a week in sales. Alright. I wanna know how many vacation hours they’ve got, and I wanna know how many at what’s the average hourly rate. Then the next thing is you go through this and for each department, and I invented this, so everybody has standards. I’m assure I’m I’m I’m sure in your plants.

 

Right? Everybody have standards? You need to associate those standards with each job, and this is just gonna be a brief explanation. So for instance, the industrial garments on a steam tunnel. This plant did 10,510 pieces, and the 100% standard for this example is 270 an hour.

 

Well, as you’re going through this, it’s critical that you know what your plant can do at a 100%. So I give it the ability, the form the ability to change that. See, it says a 100% efficiency, a 100%. Well, that’s critical as you get into the ironers. You were asked one of the questions that we were asked was how do you plan on buying new equipment?

 

Well and at what point do you plan on that? For me, it’s around 85% capacity. You better be looking to something else. If you wait past that, you’re gonna be into shifts. Our company typically does not like to run 2 shifts.

 

We try to keep it on 1. So that’s a kind of rule of thumb for me. Alright. So with that being said, at a 100% efficiency, this number will change this adjusted production number. So if it was 90%, that number would drop.

 

Alright? So the pieces divided by the adjusted standard gives you the man hours. That’s 38.9 man hours to do the job. Alright. So you analyze every department in there, and you put put the information on this.

 

I’m gonna jump down to a bigger one. It’s on the sheets. And again, these are not accurate numbers, but, these are the pieces that run through the sheet iron. Now you look at thermal blankets and bath blankets. Big pieces.

 

Right? So how many of you hand fold those things? Why? The folders, if they’re organized correctly, will fold them. Alright?

 

So you go from 88 pieces an hour, 100 pieces an hour, whatever it is your standard is for hand folding, up to 500 an hour. Is that not a big improvement? It’s a big improvement. Those are the types of things that you need to look at. Also with this form, it gives you the percent capacity.

 

It shows you that based on, 40 hours a week, that iron is only utilized for 7.4%. Alright. Obviously, as you put more pieces into this format, it’ll tell you what the capacity is. And at 75 to 85%, that’s when you better be looking at new equipment. We talked about staffing, monitoring.

 

I was asked the question about systems. My system, anybody’s system, doesn’t matter, is only as good as the people that are using it. Okay? The supervisors have got to understand what is expected of them and expected of the of the standards, and the people have got to meet those numbers. So you’ve got to monitor the output.

 

How do you do that? I heard somebody talk earlier about we ride them on a board in front of every ironer. Look, that’s great for the individual hour. Okay? And you have to post that for every hour.

 

But there’s interaction with the people. You’ve got to come back every hour and talk to them. Hey, Don. You did 95% or whatever, however you measure it. You did 95%.

 

You know, that’s good. Sam, what’s wrong? You only did 70%. You see Don right next to you, and he’s doing 95%. I really need you to pick it up.

 

So it’s a conversation that that supervisor cannot be afraid to have with hourly associates. Now there’s a right way and a wrong way. You know, you don’t stand there and scream at him. You gotta address him correctly or you’re gonna have Joanna’s problem where everybody leaves. Right?

 

That’s a big deal. It’s how you treat people and how you convey the message. Communication. That is the biggest thing. In my plant, I I ran the Atlanta facility, and at the time, that was one of the largest plants in our company.

 

Had 275,000 square feet of plant. Alright. It’s 17 ironers. And it’s a huge facility. So if somebody has an issue going on and you’re not talking about that issue, it affects your output.

 

You know, the rule was we said that this plant can go sideways in 1 hour. So basically, what we’re saying was you had to constantly communicate and keep it up. Keep going on with what was happening in the plant and make sure you monitored everything. The way I combated the or helped aid the communication portions, I insisted there was a 2 hour production meeting. Every 2 hours, each department manager would come in with certain information.

 

And I was so anal about it. I made him sit in the exact chair every day. The same spot. So my conversation was based on my Etech board, based on the numbers was, I’ve gotta have 25,000 white napkins. So it was the washroom person to tell me what well, actually it was flatwork, washroom, and receiving.

 

Receiving was the last one because guess what? They’re the one that actually get the whole thing started. So mister mister flat work guy, how many slings do you have with white napkins? Well, Mike, I’ve only got 10. Okay.

 

Well, you know I gotta have 30. So washroom got what do you have coming? Well, Mike, I’ve got 2. Okay? So you keep going through like that with expectations.

 

And when you get to the receiving department, you say, well, look. You see now I’ve got to have 12 more slings of this or 2 more slings of that. It’s the communication. And it’s not just me talking to them. They had to write it down.

 

That’s how you manage a facility because there is no one person going back to the team concept. There’s no one person that will manage a facility. No one person manages a facility, so you share that responsibility. My job was a traffic cop. I simply directed the plant and kept them on task.

 

And that’s that’s what a good plant manager does. He keeps them on task. Okay. Follow through. We talked about posting the production efficiencies.

 

You you post them on the hour, on every piece of equipment. But not only that, is you’ve got to track them by day. And I had a big spreadsheet that was blown up into a posting board that had Monday through Friday listed on it, and we listed it for 5 weeks. So at the end of the day, the supervisor posted everything that operator 1 did and put it on that board. And I had that information for up to 5 weeks, and I kept rotating 1 week off.

 

And I had 5 weeks constantly on the board. Anybody have an idea why that’s important? The big thing that you don’t give we don’t give people credit for is I want to be the best. Look at Don. He’s at 95%.

 

Now I’m at 70. I gotta pick it up a little bit. The moment I put that board up, and I’ve done that in the last 2 weeks in another facility that I’m dealing with, put that posting board up. The next morning after it was posted, the people were standing at that board looking at their scores. I had the operator or excuse me.

 

The plant manager call me yesterday and said, guess what? My production efficiencies are up 5%. 5% in just the last 2 weeks. My goal for her at the time was to improve her productivity by 5% per week. You’re not gonna go out there and get to Don’s level at 95% in 1 week.

 

If you do, you just you’re fooling yourself because somebody’s gonna quit because you’re forcing them to. But if you put peer pressure on them, and Don, you know, he’s gonna yay at me because I’m not doing as good as he is. It happens. That sounds silly, but I promise you peer pressure is a big deal when you deal with our industry. Miss Joanna’s rewarding.

 

It’s critical that you organize some type of behavior for the top ten people in the plant, just like you write warning letters for the bottom 10 in the plant. Right? I had a big posting board that said Atlanta shining stars on it. And I would list the top ten people. It doesn’t have to be extravagant like Joanna said.

 

We gave boxed lunches for the top ten people. What did it cost me? 5, $10 a piece, but look at the productivity gains that that you get. A 5% pickup in a plan is pretty good. You think Don?

 

A week? 5% is a big pickup. I’ve seen them do ice cream parties. I’ve seen them do shaved ice snow cones. They brought a snow cone truck in there because the people did good for that month or that week, gave them snow cones.

 

So I guess I’m telling you this is just simply reward your people, be honest with them up front, but the first thing you got to do is make sure your equipment is functioning correctly before you expect them to give you the numbers you want. So I’m gonna talk about, that’s coming through, our industry of chipping textiles. We currently do not chip our linen, but it is something that we are looking hard at doing just to improve throughput on in our facility. So those who don’t know about what shipping textiles is, really it’s using RFID, radio frequency identification, to track inventory, mainly ultra high frequency, which is a technology now. Industry estimation at 37%, which goes straight to the bottom line by doing this, which then occurs for better budget utilization.

 

So to buy that new piece of equipment, to buy that new truck or you know ownership buy a new pair of shoes with extra money from the bottom line. It you know it just all goes to the bottom line. So kind of the traditional way of doing soil sort is you either count it or you sort it. So just a couple pros of what soil counting is. You get a accurate count of your inventory.

 

And I have it in parenthesis or quotations because it’s never really accurate. You know, it’s somebody throwing it through a light frame or maybe, you know right counting it manually, so you never really get the accurate, count. Easy to identify customer abuse, the bags are tagged. If it has a big rat hole in it you can, easily identify it. Higher revenue per pound and then repetitive labor expense, meaning that you always will have to sort the linen, but you might not always have to count it.

 

Some cons, lower pounds per operator hour. You’re managing soil identified by the route, admin having to take all this information and plugging it in, taking a lot of admin hours, office hours, which always can lead to different mistakes. Then there’s the other way, sorting. Higher PPOH, you’re able to do it, you know, soil sort faster. You’re able to pull the requirements needed for the day.

 

You need 50,000 black napkins, so we wash the black napkins or wherever whatever item you may need. Minimize special deliveries due to par levels. Everybody has that certain amount of product that they need. 1 restaurant, you know, you need a 1000 napkins a week. We provide them with a 1000 napkins a week.

 

Some cons, consistent, inconsistent control of inventory. Meaning, you never really have a grasp on your inventory. You can send people out to account it at the stops, but you know now you’re putting more labor into your inventory. Overstocking at customers, we all know this happens. They have a special room on the 3rd floor.

 

They keep it in the basement. They keep it in the office lock so you can never you’ll never see it, in case of the emergency. And then difficult to identify the customer abuse. If you’re sorting it, you’re just sorting it as fast as you can and you’re not able to, you know, maybe utilize who’s damaging the linen. So with that, that brings it all together with RFID.

 

With RFID, you’re able to do both of those simultaneously. Meaning that, you know, the RFID is counting it for you and it just speeds up your sorting. So it’s combining both the old school techniques and bringing into a, you know, a new trend of productivity. Some benefits, track product life cycle versus expected. Everybody tracks turns.

 

You know, the higher the number, the greater. Where some people, oh, I get a 1,000 turns on my white napkin. Well, maybe with this, you know, with the RFID system, you can literally track each table cloth or whatever your, has the tag on and you can see how many times it has come back through the plant and through the facility. Highlight customers that affect your profit. You might think that, Don’s Steakhouse is the greatest customer that you know you will ever have.

 

You know, does 3,000 a week, best steakhouse in town. But in reality, Don, you know, you just damaged the linen and, you know, you have rats and, you know, you might have a good restaurant, but you’re killing the the linen. Where you might see Joe’s Cafe, which is just you know, the little cafe where they’re, man, they’re they’re the real shining star. So you you keep the Joe’s Cafes of the world Avoid mistakes, reduce time taken for on-site inventory checks. You know, you you don’t have enough red aprons, so you send, you know, so and so to check, where are the red aprons are.

 

So and and really at the end of the day, you’re just wasting time, by sending somebody because, oh, yeah. They they have it or they don’t have it and then you’re ordering more anyway. You know the exact location of each item. With it being tagged, it, synced with a route accounting software. It will show you where this is going.

 

So it prints up that you’re giving them 200 tablecloths, and you know it went to, Don’s restaurant. And and if it’s still there and if it’s not, and you only give it back to them if it comes back. No wood sold products are being returned, you know, at any given time, which is huge because if you need, you know, black napkins and you’re looking, you can pull your soil inventory and see that, okay, I have the black napkins. Let me wash them. It’s all part of management.

 

RFID synced with a router counting software. Consistent accurate and reliable soil count by item. So it’s counting it instant and from the customer that it’s being returned to. Accurate rental laws billing by customer. They can, you know, automatically even though they don’t turn it in, you can still auto bill them for what they do have.

 

You can set a time, time stamp on it to where after so many days, it’ll auto bill them, which is a nice feature. Pinpoint customers who are damaging products like Don’s restaurant and no more tags on bags. Everybody has the the bag tags. They’re all over the soil room. You gotta clean them up, you know, daily.

 

Also, an expense. You know, bag tags for the bags do cost money. So it’s also eliminating that as well. We plan on starting small, trying to really the high high cost items like the round table cloths and, you know, getting our hands or grasping one product before going all in per se. It’s starting small, figuring out the processes, and then implementing them.

 

Gain what do we plan on gaining? A lot. Thank you everybody for your time. And thank you, panelists. From proper onboarding of production staff to monitoring and rewarding your most productive employees to chipping linens with RFID to prevent losses.

 

Hopefully you picked up some valuable information that you can use to improve productivity in your laundry and we’ll send you a copy. For and we’ll send you a copy. For more information on TRSA’s Production Summit and plant tours, go to www dottrsa.org/productionsummit. You can find information on MMI at www.trsa.org /mmi. As always, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast on Apple Itunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.