Rewashes and… Brevity, attention spans…

Rewashes and…Managing them

In the laundry isle rewashes are often a big issue. It can also be one that gets exaggerated all out of proportion. First, we need to agree that zero rewashes is probably not a good thing.

Unless that account is doing the best presorting job ever seen, the simple fact is that some of the work in some of the loads will be so soiled that a normal formula won’t get them clean. So some rewashes are to be expected. The question is what’s that number?

The range of acceptability is somewhere between 2 and 5 percent. Go much over 5% and you’re running far too many reclaim loads and wasting labor, chemicals and energy. Operate close to 1% and it’s likely that they’re using too much of all three!

Beyond higher costs when rewashes get much above 5%, the resulting (and largely unnecessarily) excessive rewashes cause a production backup that inevitably results in linens that aren’t processed fast enough to allow the timely make up of rooms.

The bottom line is that we want rewashes that aren’t too high, or too low, but rather close to the acceptable target of 3% or so. Harkening back to a recent message, the goal is yet another one of those Goldilocks outcomes.

Brevity, attention spans…And covering everything

When we conduct a group training session for that large customer’s staff, we need to bear this old but wise piece of public speaking advice: “The mind can only absorb what the butt can endure!

It’s a near certainty that there have been times in all our lives when we’ve been on the receiving “end” of that truism. But despite knowing it, sometimes once we get on a roll, we say more that is necessary and explain more than warranted.

The reason behind that error is almost always that we didn’t prepare well enough and particularly in a way that would have let us hone our message to the truly critical details.

There’s a humorous quote from Mark Twain concerning a very long letter he wrote to a friend that makes that point. At its’ end he added this postscript: “Sorry for the rambling letter. I didn’t have time to make it short!”

Brevity is the key to great communications. But that still assumes that the subject at hand is fully covered – but most importantly that it’s delivered before our posterior limitations comes into play. Oh and don’t forget the ditty about a presentation needing to be like a bikini. It needs to cover the topic but still be interesting.