When bosses at laundry company Berendsen UK say their biggest challenge is “speed of cycle”, they’re not referring to the giant washing machines they fill with one million bed sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins and towels every day.
The firm collects dirty items from hotel chains, hospitals, restaurants and other establishments, takes them back to one of 90 sites across the UK, cleans them and sends them back out to be used again on beds, tables and in bathrooms.
This makes it vital that Berendsen UK has complete visibility into where items are, what state they’re in and when they’ll be needed again. In the past, says Macmillan, “keeping tabs on all that was pretty difficult”.
Here’s how it works: each item of linen contains a RFID tag. When it arrives at a Berendsen UK site for laundry, it is typically held in a giant roll cage with up to 1,000 similar items. The roll cage is pushed through a large arch-shaped scanner – similar to those found in security areas at airports, Macmillan explains. These scanners read and log every RFID tag on every item in the roll cage.
It’s only recently become possible to make laundry items “smart” in this way, through the use of tagging that identifies them and their location. While Berendsen UK has used RFID tags before on high-value items, it’s now possible to apply tagging at scale and in large volumes, Macmillan says.
That’s due to the falling cost of individual tags, which is now in the region of “pennies rather than pounds”, and to new levels of durability, which make them robust enough to withstand being washed hundreds of times. “We just had to wait a while for the technology to catch up,” he says.