The challenge
Elis is one of the world's largest providers of textile rental and hygiene services, present in 28 countries across Europe and Latin America. Its laundry centres handle thousands of customers' workwear, towels, tablecloths and bed sheets every day, which makes inventory management and laundry process tracking a major challenge.
Large volumes of many different linen types arrive from hotels, hospitals, bathing facilities and linen rental companies. Traditional sorting takes a lot of manpower and time and creates several sources of loss:
- Because of the diversity of the business, many items go missing in the laundry process every year, causing considerable losses.
- For some clients, such as hospitals, the risk of cross-infection makes it hard to count linen before washing, which leads to disputes at handover.
- It is difficult to track the washing process, wash count, stock status and classification of each item, so items can be missed and the minimum safety stock of each linen type cannot be guaranteed in time.
The solution
Elis introduced intelligent laundry management with Chainway UHF RFID readers. An RFID tag is sewn into every piece of linen, and laundry staff use the Chainway C72 handheld RFID reader to scan tags during receiving, transfer, sorting, put-away and stocktaking.
The data from each step is uploaded automatically to the back-end system over Wi-Fi in real time. Managers can see the status of the linen cycle at any moment, including wash counts and costs, rental quantities and the costs of each client.
Configuration: Chainway C72, 2D barcode scanner, UHF RFID.
The result
- Faster, more accurate sorting: linen is identified automatically and in bulk. A task that used to take several workers hours is now done by one person in a few minutes, cutting the labour cost of sorting.
- Planned replacement: the C72 records the wash count of each item accurately. The data predicts the expected service life, so replacements can be planned and the required stock level maintained.
- Transparent inventory: at goods-in and goods-out the C72 collects data in real time, and the back-end system shows current stock at a glance.
- Less loss and theft: the person responsible for each item is traceable. If an item goes missing, the RFID data shows when and where it was last detected.
