Update your analogic and old-fashioned laundry process to this century
A lot of manual work. No clear idea of your inventory in your service center or in the customer’s facilities. No accurate data on how many times items have been washed. Textiles go missing. Storage space is limited. Does this sound familiar? These are some of the issues that industrial laundry businesses face daily. But there’s nothing that a little bit of magical RFID technology couldn’t solve.
RFID laundry management system automates data management in laundry operations and, in turn, cuts labour and inventory costs. The RFID technology reads RFID tags attached to the textiles and workwear, allowing the pieces to be individually identified, tracked, and counted. You can give a digital identity to every item and start to provide your customers superior service based on effectiveness and accurate data. With better inventory management, you can obtain full stock visibility in real-time and improve your business by saving money.
We at Nordic ID have substantial experience in partnering with industrial laundries. We offer a complete laundry solution for industrial laundries, including all you need for your laundry management system.
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What problems can the RFID laundry management system solve?
RFID laundry solutions can digitalize and automate your operations, offering many benefits and solutions to issues that industrial laundries face daily.
A lot of manual work & repetitive tasks
Industrial laundry service providers benefit the most from laundry management systems as they can automate tedious and repetitive tasks. Without automation, managing laundry means manual work, which usually leads to inefficient laundry processes. With automation, you can optimize the laundry process and minimize human error while removing numerous labour-intensive tasks. For example, RFID enables the identification and counting of the incoming soiled laundry automatically from the trolleys when they are transferred in from the loading dock doors. In the RFID laundry management system, the reading of products (in and out) and sorting of them happens in bulk. When you remove time-consuming and monotonous tasks, you leave staff to perform more rewarding tasks.
No accurate data about stock and low utilization rate
RFID laundry management system will give you better item management. Suppose you don’t have control over your inventory. In that case, you don’t know the number of items at the customer, and you don’t utilize your limited storage space efficiently. Tracking & tracing items in the laundry process and at the end customer enables complete inventory control. By tracking items, you can raise your utilization rate and ensure the right items are at the right customer at the right time.
No optimized inventory per customer
As said, by utilizing RFID, you can get better inventory management and obtain full stock visibility in real-time. When you know where all of your items are, you can have less stock per customer. Most remarkably, fewer items per customer mean a lower investment per customer. Managing inventory on a item level enables you to have a more profitable business.
Items go missing
RFID tagging helps with loss prevention. RFID laundry management system saves money by identifying when and where items are lost or stolen. The laundry knows when and where items are lost in the process. If the customer has lost the item, you can send the bill to the correct address.
Unnecessary logistics
Challenges in inventory management inevitably lead to inefficient processes. You don’t accurately know when to send or pick up items without real-time inventory management. With RFID, you can optimize all this, saving money on logistics. When you know how many items are at your customer, you can cut the unnecessary logistics drives between your laundry and your customer. You can have a pick-up for dirty laundry only when needed. You can also gain lower emissions through logistics when you don’t drive when scheduled but only when needed.
No identified data on usage and aging of items
The RFID laundry management system can determine how often you have washed an item and when it needs replacing. Item level management helps to keep track of individual items. For example, you have information on whether a broken item has been replaced or refunded to the customer. RFID helps collect data on textiles’ usage and aging, and the system can inform when an item requires a manual check. The laundry system can alarm you when an item has undergone a certain number of wash cycles. Item level data helps with item care and recycling of items, helping you lower your environmental impact. Less waste and fewer items mean savings in money and lower emissions for your operation.
A need to manage personified items
RFID laundry management system enables easy and worry-free management of personified items. You can easily track personified items in the laundry process and at the end customer by tracking textiles or workwear on item level. RFID tags help to identify items and locate them when needed. For example, you can track in real-time how many items a user holds.
Need for competitiveness, improvement in customer relations, or new business models
When you, as an industrial laundry service provider, can offer solutions that improve your customer’s efficiency and productivity, you gain a competitive advantage and profit from process improvements. You can enhance customer relations and develop new business models that set you apart from your competitors. By reducing errors and having complete visibility of the entire production chain, the laundry service provider has all the necessary information to offer quality service and thus increase customer loyalty. RFID laundry management system adds value to the end customer through easy-to-use lending stations, suitable workwear at the right time, and optimized storage spaces. RFID laundry management system enables you to provide laundry or workwear as a service. With the necessary infrastructure and data, it is easy to take a new business model into use.
How much do we have to invest?
We at Nordic ID have strong experience in partnering with industrial laundries. We offer a complete laundry solution for industrial laundries, including all you need for your laundry management system.
You can start to pilot the service with a small investment. This piloting investment includes devices to read products in and out, monitoring the washing process and logistics. Depending on your needs, this can be done using a couple of handheld readers. Handheld readers work with our RADEA Mobile Client, which manages and visualizes the data. If needed, a small pilot can also include a tagging station where the items are added with an RFID tag and then added to the inventory. Besides the investment in devices, the pilot consists of operational costs that are billed monthly.
You can easily upgrade the small laundry solution to a system that responds best to your needs when you want to increase the level of automation. This inclusive solution can include multiple RFID solutions like loading bay reading, cage reading, sorting station reading, after-wash reading, or identification of the products in any process step identified as being important for the business process. All of them work with RFID fixed readers for an easy-to-use automatized process. For example, cage reading with fixed readers offers prompt reading for parcels before they leave to the customer’s premises or when they come from there. RFID tunnels can be used before and after washing to identify dirty and clean textiles. Besides fixed solutions, you can use handheld readers for several purposes, such as associating products or reading them individually. Handheld readers are mobile and thus can be used at the end customer or in the delivery truck to do readings.
Connect your laundry management system to ERP
RFID can provide tracking & tracing of items and data on an item level. To fully benefit from digitalizing your assets, connect the item tracking data to other systems in use in your business. When you integrate the RFID solution into other systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the information becomes richer, helping the management and operation team to make better decisions and choices. Connecting your laundry management system to ERP enables RFID data to be associated, for example, with customer details and billing information. RFID tracking can even monitor the whole lifecycle of a product from production to use. We at Nordic ID understand the benefits of integrated systems and therefore offer customized system integrations based on your needs to create more connected data.
Centralized high item count industrial laundry business benefits the most from automatizing the operations with RFID. Get more reliability and accuracy, enhance the customer experience and save your precious resources by utilizing RFID.
Contact our RFID expert and start piloting the RFID laundry management system.
