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Keeping laundry clean. Making sure there are enough towels. Balancing housekeeping staff on-hand with the workload required. And ultimately, keeping customers happy.

These tasks might sound simple, but only those in the hotel or hospitality industry will understand how difficult they can be. And especially how difficult they can be to complete efficiently.

In the end, all of these tasks depend on a laundry and housekeeping system that is well-organised, well-documented, and flexible so that it can handle high and low occupancy periods. If you’d like your laundry to operate like that – we hope these tips will help.

How Much Laundry Needs to be Washed?

You might be surprised how many properties don’t know the answer to this question.

Thankfully, there is a relatively simply method of estimating this demand based on your occupancy. It’s called Kilos Per Occupied Room (KPOR).

To calculate KPOR, you must first get an idea how much laundry you must wash and dry per occupied room. You can either track individual rooms, or track the weight of your total laundered material in a day, and divide it by the amount of rooms that were occupied on that day.

KPOR = Total Laundry Washed ÷ Total Occupied Rooms

Once you know how much laundry you must wash per room (KPOR), forecasting demand is easy. Just multiply your KPOR by the amount of rooms booked, and you’ll know about how much laundry you’ll need to wash that day.

LAUNDRY FORECAST = KPOR x Total Booked Rooms

How Much Laundry can Your Facility Handle?

The necessary next step is to figure out how much laundry you can wash, and how long it takes to do so. Don’t worry, there are formulas for this too.

One way to figure it out is to divide the amount of laundry that needs to be done by the total rated capacity of all your washers.

For example, if you have 3 washers rated at 50kg capacity, your total capacity is 150kg.  If your machines take an hour per load, you can wash 150kg per hour. So if you’ve got to wash 1350kg of laundry in a day, it’ll take you 9 hours to do it.

TIME REQUIRED = Laundry Forecast (in kg) ÷ Capacity

Time to Start Controlling Your Laundry

With those two simple equations as a foundation, you can begin to predict demand and control your laundry operation.

It’ll take 9 hours to wash your laundry. Find out how much time it will take to fold and dry that laundry, and you’ll have an idea of how many hours of labour you’ll need. Now you can schedule the right amount of staff for the right amount of hours – based just on how many rooms are booked.

The bottom line here is that you can start to perform laundry operations based on a plan – rather than letting your laundry needs determine your plan.

We’re Here to Help

If you need help planning or designing your laundry, we’ve got 40 years of experience supplying and serving Australian laundry machines, and we can help.

Whether you’re looking for some well-informed advice, or seeking to buy an industrial washing machine, give us a shout any time and we’re happy to help.