Originally posted – Jun 25, 2013
As your wash-dry-fold business grows from doing just a few loads at a time to handling several loads simultaneously, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is simply keeping track of all the orders that come in.
It’s critical to have systematic controls in place, or else mistakes will be made – guaranteed.
For instance, at my store, we often will take in wash-dry-fold loads during one shift, but don’t even start working on them until the next shift. It’s not unusual for wash-dry-fold orders to get passed off between one shift and another. In some cases, we’ll have one attendant washing and drying the clothes, and another person folding or processing the garments.
So, you must have some sort of system in place to ensure the garments stay together.
Traditionally, with wash-dry-fold orders, we try not to wash anybody’s clothes with anybody else’s items. The best policy is: if you can keep an order together, keep it together. If it’s small enough, keep it in one dryer. Keep the garments in one section of the store. Process it all at one time. Even with larger orders of several hundred pounds, try to process it all at the same time, and keep it together.
However, that’s not always possible, which is why you’ve got to have a system, and your employees need to understand it. What’s more, it’s got to start from the minute a wash-dry-fold order comes through the door.
This process is no different than when you hand over your clothes to a drycleaner. A quality dry cleaning business will tag every individual garment. If they’ve got a computerized POS system, they may have tags with their name on it, or they may actually apply a barcode to the inside of your garment so that they can identify whose it is simply by scanning it. Some drycleaners even have little RF chips that they will insert into your garment so that they can reassemble an order and know whose garment it belongs to whom.
There are many scenarios where you, as a laundry owner, would want to individually tag your wash-dry-fold items, similar to what drycleaners might do.
For example, let’s say you take in three blankets from three separate customers on the same day. It only makes sense to wash and dry those three blankets together for added efficiency. You can implement a tagging system and place a tag on each blanket. This way you can wash them together, and your attendants can keep track of which item goes back to which customer.
In other situations, you might take in a drop-off order that has a scary red item in it or perhaps a brand new pair of jeans. You can pull that garment, tag it and maybe place it into a separate load of very dark garments. And, by tagging it, you can keep track of it and then process it with the rest of that customer’s original load of clothes, once it has been washed and dried. By doing so, you reduce the risk of polluting the rest of that load.
One of the issues that we’re constantly battling at my laundry is walking into the store first thing in the morning – with 20 bags of wash-dry-fold laundry waiting for us. Which bags go with which order?
Frequently, customers will bring in more than one bag of laundry, and they’re not always going to have the same type of bag – but it’s the same order.
We also get a lot of business from traveling groups, and sometimes these customers will bring in five bags of clothes, but it’s from five different people; they’ve all got to be washed separately, but it’s still one order.
Moreover, with our regular wash-dry-fold customers, many of them will bring in their laundry in bags that have our store’s logo on them, and as a result, they all look the same.
It’s easy to understand how some customers’ loads can easily get accidentally mixed up. There will be one black garbage bag of laundry next to another black garbage bag of laundry; they’re two different customers, and they look identical. It’s going to happen, and I promise you that somebody is going to make a mistake.
Therefore, our policy is that every bag that comes in must have a ticket on it or a note in it. We have a POS system, so we have the ability to print out as many tickets as we want. Moving through the process, every machine will also have a ticket taped to it – featuring the customer’s name, order number and any other pertinent information.
Before we had our POS system, every bag had to have a note in it – a Post-it note or just a piece of paper – identifying that particular load from the moment it entered the store.
When you take it in, you need to mark it. When you process it, you should re-mark it. And when you assemble the finished order, you should mark it again.
One of the little – but very helpful – things we do when assembling orders is to include the number of bags that came in. After all, sometimes with larger wash-dry-fold orders we’ll have garments hanging, as well as folded in a bag. So, now, with every order on each bag, we make sure to not only list the customer’s name but also the amount of bags that originally came in with that specific order. For example, we’ll denote a specific bag as “one of five” or “one of seven” or “one of 10” – whatever the case may be.
This way, the attendant handing back the order to the customer knows that, if she didn’t give them all five or seven or 10 slips with that customer’s name and order number on them, something is missing. It’s a great final mental check for the attendants returning orders to the customers.
Similarly, when a good drycleaner hands over an order to you, they typically tell you how many garments you are receiving because they’ve mentally noted it. When they grabbed the order, they looked at the ticket, saw the number of garments there and then counted the pieces. Saying it to you just reinforces that they are returning everything to you. They’re mentally checking it off in their mind, and they’re confirming it with you.
Your attendants can – and should – follow this same procedure when returning wash-dry-fold orders (especially larger ones) to customers: “Here are your five bags…”
Train your employees to communicate in this way with your drop-off customers. It’s an effective final check of your wash-dry-fold process, and a great way to avoid costly mistakes.
