Commercial Laundry Maintenance

Commercial Laundry Maintenance is a Must

In simple terms ... Equipment Downtime = Lost Throughout = Lost Revenue. 

Furthermore, equipment downtime can negatively affect your employees by interrupting their workflow. 

Just like the health and longevity of your home, your car or your body, prevention is key. 

The same holds true for your commercial laundry maintenance program. 

The goal? Stop problems before they start. 

Before we continue, make sure to click below to download your copy of our free preventive maintenance e-book. 

The Dreaded Unplanned Downtime

To put some numbers to the problem, what happens when a plant has unplanned downtime? 

According to statistics compiled by the TWI Institute on the manufacturing industry as a whole, 80% of unplanned downtime is the result of equipment failure.

Furthermore, the article cites the International Society of Automation, which notes the average manufacturing plant loses 5-20% of its annual productivity due to unplanned downtime. Of course, these figures can vary by industry sub-sector, but the numbers shed light on the potential positive impact a strong preventive maintenance process can have. 

Now, you can put two and two together to deduce unplanned downtime is a gateway to lost productivity, which impacts your bottom line. 

Commercial Laundry Maintenance Checklist

What are some common things to monitor in your plant as part of a commercial laundry maintenance regimen? Below we'll outline a few things to always keep at the top of your mind as you look to maximize efficiency by mitigating equipment downtime. 

In short, how do you know you're due for an upgrade? Take a look at the list below and see how many apply to your commercial laundry maintenance program: 

• YOUR MAINTENANCE TEAM IS CONSTANTLY CALLED FOR UNPLANNED WORK

  To get an understanding for how your preventive maintenance (PM) program is performing, tally on a post-it each time your maintenance team is called for unplanned work throughout the day. A higher number of tallies likely means you'll need to make adjustments to make your preventive maintenance program more effective. 

• THE ENTIRE PROGRAM IS TRACKED ON PAPER OR EXCEL

  Tracking your preventive maintenance in Excel or on paper is a start, but leaves a lot of room for improvement. Poor organization can lead to missed PMs, lack of historical reporting can lead to making important decisions without valid data points, and lack of redundancy means if something were to happen to an individual's personal computer where a file was saved, you would have to start from scratch with a new PM program.

• YOUR MACHINES ARE ROUTINELY JAMMING & REQUIRE ENGINEERING ATTENTION

  One of the most telling signs your PM program is falling short is if a piece of equipment is constantly jamming or requiring engineering attention. Many organizations brush these items off as a necessary evil and simply a quick fix on the floor. In reality, these problems can be extremely disruptive and add up to a larger percentage of the workday than you might think. Do you have a program that is capable of measuring how much these issues are costing you?

• INABILITY TO REVIEW THE STATUS OF ANY MAINTENANCE TASK

  You can schedule all the tasks you want, but at the end of the day a preventive maintenance program is only effective if these tasks are actually getting performed. Having the capabilities to quickly view the history of any piece of equipment in your plant and visualize the status of each PM is vital to ensuring the long-term health of your PM program. 

How to Boost Your Commercial Laundry Maintenance Program

We've identified a few ways your preventive maintenance program might be due for an upgrade. The next question is: what do you do next? 

In short, third-party software, like Spindle, can help your team unlock new levels of organizational efficiency and visibility. When it comes to equipment, that means: 

• Who's doing what? 
• When are they doing it? 
• Did they do it when they were scheduled to? 
• What is the overall history of maintenance on a particular piece of equipment? 

And much, much more. Every piece of equipment is essentially producing data, all the time.

In a figurative sense, every piece of equipment is talking to you. The question is, are you listening? In addition, are you doing anything with what they're telling you (i.e., data)?

That, in a nutshell, is the cornerstone of preventive maintenance. When broken down in a simple process flow, it goes something like this:

1. Measure: collect data related to your equipment's performance and maintenance history
2. Organize: once you have the data, make sure it's organized in a digestible way (software like Spindle can help automate that process)
3. Reassess: using the targeted data, take a look at what you've been doing and identify potential problem areas
4. Execute: armed with data and a plan, you can then execute a solution ... after which you start the process over again to determine if the solution got the job done

Forget Messy Excel Spreadsheets ... Use Commercial Laundry Maintenance Software 

Spreadsheets and paper can only take you so far. In order to truly unlock your plant's potential, your team first needs to improve the organization and visibility around your maintenance program's activities.

Selecting a software designed for an industry similar to yours will enhance the user experience, improve employee adoption, and solve problems specific to you that other tools can't. Utilize this software to automate mundane tasks, provide advanced analytics, simplify work order creation, scheduling, and how you assign tasks to your maintenance team.

The additional benefit of having all your information backed up in the cloud and accessible from anywhere is icing on the cake.

Understand What Your Maintenance Team is Working On

The increased organization that comes with utilizing a third-party software to help manage your maintenance program also increases your team's ability to operate more efficiently.

It will be easier than ever to schedule your workforce accordingly based on what maintenance tasks are scheduled to be performed that week. By providing more visibility into all maintenance requirements, your team will ensure engineering and production departments are operating with the same goal of improving uptime.

Measure, Measure, Measure (Your PM Completion Effectiveness)

You can't improve what you don't measure. By measuring the amount of time it takes to perform each task and comparing it against the expected amount of time for each PM, your organization can identify work order effectiveness.

For example, let's say your team is performing a task that is expected to take an hour, but is completed in 7 minutes. Was this task actually completed?

Maybe this task was accidentally marked "complete" or the employee got called off to emergency maintenance.

Either way, if this information isn't being tracked - you are likely missing out on the full picture of what is (and is not) happening around your plant.

Once You Have the Data, Review Historical Trends ... Then Adjust

Having access to historical data allows your organization to examine if your team is performing proper maintenance. By looking at a combination of all preventive and emergency maintenance tasks across your assets, your team can identify if you need to make changes.

For example, are you performing a weekly task on an ironer that is constantly jamming throughout the week? Analyze this point of failure and determine why it might be happening. You may want to add a step to the weekly PM and review if this failure continues to happen.

Commercial laundry maintenance is a cornerstone of a healthy plant. Just as we used the examples of your house, car or even the human body, many problems can be stopped or mitigated before they start when addressed in a preventive, proactive manner. 

In a nutshell, software applications for the laundry industry, like Spindle, help take the guesswork and wishful thinking out of the equation. Equipment can and will break down: it's just a matter of when. 

Wouldn't you rather know when that might happen than be in the dark?

With real-time data collected automatically — meaning, you save time having to collect it yourself, freeing you up to do other things — you can shed light on every corner and crevice of your plant. 

Things happen. Even the best preventive maintenance programs likely won't prevent 100% of all equipment failures. With that said, if you can reduce unplanned downtime, which more often than not is the result of equipment failure, you are already clawing back lost revenues. 

So, while implementing a strong commercial laundry maintenance routine might seem like a lot of work or cost you money on the front end, it will save you time, money and lots of headaches in the long run.