Why aren’t we measuring dispatch like production?Lessons from a Commercial Laundry’s Dispatch Operation

As an industry, we are very good at measuring productivity. Ask a production manager how many sheets per hour their ironer is producing and there is a good chance they can tell you immediately. Ask how many towels per hour an operator can feed through a towel folder and they will probably know that as well. Most will know their plant’s overall kilos per operator hour (KPOH), and many will know the expected productivity of individual pieces of finishing equipment.

We measure ironer speed, we measure pieces per hour, we measure folding rates, we measure washroom throughput, we measure labour hours. Then we look for opportunities to improve them. Can we run the ironer faster? Can we reduce gaps between sheets? Can we get more towels through the folder? Can we improve presentation rates? Can we automate another process? All worthwhile questions. But there is one area of the laundry that I believe often receives considerably less attention. Dispatch.

Is dispatch really a production department?

In many laundries, dispatch is treated more as a necessary function than a production process. The linen has already been washed, dried, ironed and folded. Dispatch simply must get it packed into trolleys, cages or bags and ready for delivery.

But “simply” can hide a considerable amount of labour.

Depending on the operation, dispatch staff may be assembling orders, packing trolleys, checking quantities, scanning RFID products, wrapping loads, labelling, staging deliveries, locating missing products and dealing with shortages or last-minute changes. Yet ask the same production manager what their dispatch team’s productivity was yesterday and the answer is often much harder to obtain. Some laundries measure trolleys packed per hour. Others might measure bags packed, orders completed or simply roster a certain number of people into dispatch each day.

These measurements have some value, but they can also be misleading. One trolley might contain 50 kilograms and another 150 kilograms. One customer order might involve a small number of high-volume products while another involves dozens of individual SKUs. So how do we create a meaningful productivity measure?

Measure dispatch the same way we measure the plant

One of the better approaches I have seen was surprisingly simple. The laundry decided to treat dispatch as its own production centre and measure dispatch kilos per operator hour. Rather than trying to create complicated measures around trolleys, bags or individual orders, they used something the business already knew: the kilograms of dry product sold.

The first step was not to immediately establish a target. It was to establish a baseline.

Over approximately three months, the business recorded the total labour hours used within dispatch. Importantly, this included everyone working in the department and all relevant overtime. They then compared those hours with the dry kilograms sold during the same period.

The calculation was simple: Dry kilograms sold ÷ total dispatch labour hours = Dispatch KPOH. Suddenly, dispatch had a productivity measurement that could be tracked in exactly the same language as the rest of the plant. But measuring it was only the beginning.

Don’t start by telling people to work faster

This was probably the most important part of the exercise. Once the business had established an accurate baseline, management didn’t simply set a higher target and tell the dispatch team they needed to improve.

They brought the team together and asked them a question:

“What stops you from being more productive?” Or, put another way: “What wastes your time during the day?”

That is a very different conversation. The people doing a job every day generally know where the wasted time is. They know what they are waiting for, what causes double handling, what they continually have to walk across the department to find and which processes make their job unnecessarily difficult.

In this particular operation, one of the biggest issues identified was trolleys. Dispatch was regularly waiting for trolleys to become available. At other times, staff would begin packing a trolley but couldn’t complete it because they were waiting for the balance of the product to come through production.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that the dispatch team was working too slowly. The problem was that they were waiting.

And waiting is one of the easiest forms of lost productivity to overlook.

The cost of stop-start dispatch

Consider what happens when a dispatch operator starts building an order but doesn’t have everything required to complete it. They may partially pack the trolley. Then stop. Move to another order. Find another trolley. Return to the first order later. Check what has already been packed. Find the missing product. Complete the trolley. Move it to staging.

Every interruption potentially introduces additional handling, walking, checking and administration. Individually, these delays may only represent a few minutes. Across multiple people, hundreds of trolleys and five, six or seven operating days each week, those minutes can become a substantial number of labour hours.

The important point is that none of this will necessarily be visible if the only productivity measurement being watched is total plant KPOH. The inefficiency becomes buried within the overall number.

Disconnecting dispatch from production

After listening to its dispatch team, the laundry made a number of changes. Processes were changed. Start and finish times were reviewed. The availability and movement of trolleys was improved. The flow of finished product into dispatch was reconsidered.

Most importantly, the business worked towards removing the constant dependency between dispatch and the finishing department. In effect, they attempted to  disconnect dispatch from production. Rather than dispatch operating at the pace dictated by whatever happened to be coming off the production floor at that moment, the objective was to provide dispatch with the product, equipment and information required to work continuously and efficiently.

The result? An improvement in dispatch productivity of close to 30%. That is a significant productivity gain. And it wasn’t achieved by buying a faster ironer, another towel folder or a new piece of automation. It came primarily from understanding the process, measuring it and removing the roadblocks affecting the people doing the work.

Where is your dispatch team losing time?

Every laundry will be different, but there are some basic questions worth asking. Is dispatch regularly waiting for clean product? Are staff waiting for trolleys, cages, bags or other equipment? Are orders being partially packed and then revisited later? How much time is spent looking for missing products? How much double handling takes place? Are staff walking excessive distances?

Are dispatch hours aligned with when product is actually available? Do customer-specific packing requirements unnecessarily complicate the process? Are shortages discovered early enough, or only when the order is being packed? Is information available to dispatch early enough for them to plan their workload?

And perhaps most importantly: Have you asked the dispatch team what wastes their time?

The answers may be more valuable than another management meeting discussing how to increase ironer speed.

Start with the data, not the target

If you haven’t previously measured dispatch productivity, I would resist the temptation to immediately set a KPOH target. Measure first. Take two or three months of reasonably clean data. Record all labour hours actually consumed within dispatch and compare them with dry kilograms sold over the same period. Establish what your current operation is actually achieving.

Then start looking at variations. Why was one week better than another? Why was Monday particularly labour intensive? What happened on the day when productivity was significantly higher? Was the product available earlier? Were there more trolleys available? Was the customer mix different? Was there less overtime? Did the team start at a different time?

Good productivity data should create questions. Those questions create conversations. And those conversations often identify the improvement opportunities.

Productivity isn’t always about working faster

This is perhaps the biggest lesson. When we talk about productivity, people can understandably interpret it as management asking them to work harder or faster. In many cases, that isn’t where the opportunity lies. An operator waiting ten minutes for a trolley doesn’t need to work faster. An employee walking backwards and forwards looking for missing linen doesn’t need to work faster.

A dispatch team that cannot finish an order because production hasn’t completed one SKU doesn’t need to work faster. The process needs to work better. There is an important distinction. The best productivity improvements often come from allowing people to spend more of their paid hours doing productive work and fewer hours waiting, searching, walking, rechecking and double handling.

The hidden factory at the end of the laundry

Commercial laundries will continue to invest heavily in automation and production equipment, and rightly so. We will continue measuring ironer speeds, towel-folding rates, washroom throughput and whole-of-plant KPOH. But perhaps we should also look a little harder at what happens after the linen has been folded.

Dispatch can represent a substantial labour centre, yet in many operations its productivity remains relatively poorly measured. Treat it as a production department. Measure its labour. Measure its output. Establish a baseline. Then, before deciding how it should be improved, talk to the people actually doing the job. Ask them what they wait for. Ask them what they handle twice. Ask them what causes them to stop. Ask them what wastes their time.

You might find that one of the best remaining opportunities to improve productivity in your laundry isn’t another machine on the production floor. It may be sitting in dispatch.

Want to uncover where your laundry is losing productivity?

Ray Hayes Commercial Laundry Consulting helps commercial laundries identify operational inefficiencies, improve productivity and find practical opportunities to reduce wasted labour.