RFID a major asset for industrial laundries

The laundry, a key service during the health crisis 🏥

Many laundries have stepped in to help hospitals and medical staff with the coronavirus crisis. 

Indeed, they are among the few companies that remained open during the state of emergency. Many have been forced to adapt their service to meet the new requirements. Tons of kilos of linen from hospitals and nursing homes were washed every day.

In some cases, they have completely abandoned their main production devoted to the hotel and catering sector, to focus exclusively on the disinfection of sanitary material arriving from the various hospitals in the country.

They have had a major role in:

• Ensuring flawless textile upkeep: hygiene, disinfection and preventive measures are increasingly important in the fight against the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
  Studies have shown that the virus can live on different surfaces (textiles) for hours, so many establishments have had to intensify their hygiene and cleaning protocols.

• Protecting the health of patients and hospital staff: laundries must adhere to strict hygiene measures to provide maximum protection for people in overcrowded hospitals, which are a source of contamination.

A fast-growing sector 🚀

In addition to the problems linked to the recent health crisis, the laundry sector is undergoing major changes, particularly in terms of technology and the environment. Each year, it faces new challenges to remain competitive in the face of increased competition. 

• Economic, social and environmental challenges

Companies in the sector face many challenges. They must provide their customers with a faultless level of cleanliness and quality. For this reason, they are equipped with numerous machines which, depending on the level of obsolescence, can consume a varying amount of energy and thus represent a significant expense. It is therefore necessary for a laundry to allocate a significant budget to the purchase of efficient equipment.

In addition, there are staffing shortages because, despite their high level of technology, these machines require human intervention to operate. Since the health crisis, labour is becoming increasingly scarce and finding qualified employees is a challenge for laundry managers.

In addition to the economic and social issues, they also have to deal with the environmental impact of cleaning a large volume of textiles every day. An industrial laundry uses a very large amount of water and electricity daily. This is a real problem that we must be able to remedy.

One solution to alleviate these numerous challenges is to invest in technological equipment.

This investment may involve the purchase of efficient, innovative machines, and also the implementation of solutions to automate processes and thus increase productivity and quality, and reduce costs considerably. 

Amongst these solutions we can mention RFID systems.

• Improvement of processes in industrial laundries with RFID technology

The insertion of the RFID into linen subject to industrial washing processes is a significant step forward for the laundry.
It makes it possible to:

• Reduce human intervention on time-consuming and repetitive tasks: this reduces human error and improves productivity by saving time on monotonous tasks, leaving staff to perform more rewarding tasks.
  
  

• Obtain full stock visibility in real time: RFID offers complete traceability for the production chain, thus minimising the risk of stock-outs or overstocking.
  
  

• Automate processes: by automating tasks, as is the case for inventories in particular, errors can be reduced considerably and productivity can be increased.
  
  

• Reduce losses and thefts: it is possible to have real time knowledge of the location of each article of linen as a result of the reliable information provided by the traceability system, which will record the data.
  
  

• Reduce the environmental impact: due to the unique identification of laundry items via RFID tags and RFID chips, it is possible to mix linen from different customers and therefore reduce the consumption of water, gas, washing products, etc.
  
  

• Improve customer relations: by reducing errors and having complete visibility of the entire production chain, the laundry has all the necessary information to offer a quality service and thus increase customer loyalty.
  
  

• Reduce costs: the implementation of a traceability system makes it possible to optimise the life cycle of the linen, reduce losses and personnel costs.

Hospital laundries are equipping themselves with the RFID solution from UBI Solutions 🔍

• Interhospitalia

Interhospitalia, Barcelona’s hospital laundry at the forefront of innovation, serves more than 22 hospitals and manages more than 20 metric tons of linen per day.

The laundry manager experienced a real problem with stock management, because he did not have a centralised linen service as each client managed their own linen. Significant losses and errors were identified which led him to search for a system to track all linen article by article in real time.

The RFID laundry traceability solution which was set up not only allowed the linen to be tracked within the laundry itself, but also enabled its customers to track it in their own hospitals.

RFID reader booth installed in the laundry

The company is now able to monitor stock for resupply and to provide hospitals with specific information so that they can improve their management and reduce waste.

• Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris

A few years ago, the AP-HP experienced a real problem with linen shortages. In the laundry for these hospitals, 35 metric tons of linen were dealt with every day to be washed, dried, ironed and folded. Difficult management, particularly for operations involving inventories, the reception of washed sheets and the preparation of supply trolleys for hospital departments, which caused significant losses of linen and money. 

In view of this catastrophic situation, Jean-Charles Grupeli, director of the AP-HP laundry, called on UBI Solutions to set up an RFID traceability system which made accurate monitoring of all outgoing and incoming sheets possible, thus reducing the duration of inventory operations and above all optimising stock management.

«We decided to make this investment because a lot of linen was disappearing," explains Jean-Charles Grupeli, director of the AP-HP laundry. “Since then, annual purchases have halved.» 

UBI Solutions is now a benchmark in the field of textile traceability. Laundries such as BIH, AP-HP, Interhospitalia, Fishers and many others are taking advantage of the many benefits of RFID technology.

If you too would like to reduce your losses and optimise your linen management, we invite you to contact us. 

If you can’t make up your mind and would like more information, download our free white paper on textile traceability.