“Does Anyone Really Care?”
by Ken Tyler

The trouble with utilization, development and management of textile care (laundry operations, linen distribution etc.) quality and excellence standards usually starts with the term, “it depends.” When someone is trying to determine the best laundry process, or the best laundry system (equipment), experts and most consultants in the textile care industry will tell you -- it depends on a troublesome number of factors. Those factors include: when you are going to use the process or a particular type of equipment, what textile item are you trying to process, how often you expect to not to be able to make your customers satisfied, how often supplies are not going to be purchased or delivered on time, etc.

The best process or system could be one of a dozen different processing techniques or items of equipment. There is really no BEST; the best or closest you can get to best under a different set of circumstances, in a particular environment is only within certain perimeters. After arguing about the relative merits of different types of laundry equipment, ultimately, a different type of equipment with different merits will become available in our ever changing industry.

There is no doubt in today’s textile care arena that you must spend money not only to save money, but also to maintain a satisfactory level of quality. One will always wonder how uncomfortable the idea of “best” is. We know it has something to do with “quality” and “excellence,” but what do these words mean in a world where they appear in every mission statement on the planet?

The more you think about the idea of quality, the more you realize how elusive this term can be. Most managers usually fail trying to determine a definition of quality. This is easy to calculate and fun to watch…I’ve done it for many years. Quality and excellence are quite simply like truth and beauty, they are only philosophical terms that can be attached to terms like precision, intelligence, accuracy, power and finally efficiency… In other words you cannot nail down the definition.

It is like the notion that a laundry should have a physical barrier between soiled and clean processing. While the design may promulgate a good work flow, it does not necessarily increase or decrease the risk of disease to workers or other customers. There is just no evidence supporting that, even though the notion continues, like the old theory that you must wash hospital/health care laundry in high temperature water. That theory continues even though studies have been conducted that contradict this old practice. Some states continue the requirement based on the theory that the world is flat, I suppose.