Efficiency can slow you down.
Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it?
In commercial laundry and dry cleaning, efficiency is usually regarded as unquestionably good. Faster machines, higher production rates and fewer minutes/kilogram all look like signs of a well-oiled operation. But there is a danger in optimizing individual departments without considering the operation as a whole.
The Ecosystem
A plant is not a collection of machines, nor is it simply a series of departments. It is an ecosystem.
The best equipment and the fastest operators in the world cannot compensate for a poor workflow; improving one part of the process may simply move a bottleneck further down the line. Sorting feeds washing, washing feeds drying, drying feeds finishing, and finishing feeds packing and dispatch. If one department becomes dramatically more efficient than the next, its success can quickly become someone else’s problem.
Working as a consultant specializing in systems and workflow, I tell all plant managers that the most useful thing they can do is simply watch.
- Where are garments accumulating?
- Where are team members lingering?
- Who is going home early, and who is always working overtime?
- Where does work get sent backwards?
- Where are garments being handled more times than necessary?
These observations often tell you more about plant efficiency than any production report.
When efficiency backfires
Counter: You’ve trained your staff to constantly feed the cleaning departments. Your cleaners are efficient; they keep up with the steady flow of work and, by lunch time, are cleaning work not due back for two or more days. They’re ahead. But as 4 p.m. approaches, it’s all hands on deck hunting down those last few urgent pieces, which are lost somewhere in the rails of garments not due for days, waiting to be pressed.
Washing: Your new washer-extractor increases capacity from 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms a day. If finishing can process only 1,100 kilograms, the additional 400 kilograms does not represent extra output. It becomes a growing queue of clean laundry, consuming floor space, increasing handling and potentially delaying customer orders.
Dry cleaning: The effect can be even more subtle. A dry cleaner who dramatically increases machine throughput may simply overwhelm spotting and quality control. More garments are cleaned, but fewer receive adequate inspection. Rework, customer complaints and missed defects can then wipe out the apparent productivity gain.
Dispatch: Reducing delivery runs may lower fleet costs, but larger and less frequent collections can produce peaks in sorting and washing, creating congestion and overtime inside the plant.
Two kinds of efficiency
The lesson is not that efficiency is bad. It is that local efficiency is not necessarily system efficiency.
Keeping every machine running at 100% utilization can increase work-in-progress, hide priorities and lengthen lead times. The goal should instead be to optimize the flow from customer order to completed delivery.
I have always believed that the best plant managers learn to look at the operation as a whole. Instead of asking, “How can I get higher productivity out of this department, machine or person?” ask, “What is preventing the plant from moving together?”
With six locations across Nova Scotia offering GreenEarth dry cleaning, Kyle Jamieson of DeLuxe Dry Cleaners agrees that time on the floor is essential to the success of any dry cleaning plant.
“Working the front lines with your employees helps you understand the needs of the business, the needs of your team members and the focus you should have on certain garments and higher yielding avenues of business,” he says.
The real goal
Whether yours is family run or staffed, one location or many, a plant that operates as a system will always outperform a collection of individually efficient departments. The goal isn’t to make every part of the plant busy. The goal is to make the whole plant flow.
By Tara Clark – Consultant and Partnerships Director at GreenEarth Cleaning
