Increase in Laundry Facility Output with Item Intelligence

Established in 1854, Berendsen is a European textile service business with 127 locations in 15 countries throughout Europe. Berendsen provides service solutions to lease, source, clean and maintain textiles used in various settings, including healthcare, washroom, hotel, restaurant, and cleanroom. Since 1996, Berendsen has focused on providing services for the healthcare and industrial areas, becoming a leader in their field. Supplying hospitals, retirement homes and care facilities with linens represents a significant part of the daily business for one Berendsen facility in Germany. This facility receives tons of used linens each day. The contaminated linens, shipped in laundry bags and roll cages, are weighed rather than counted to protect workers from the risk of infection. Once the linens are washed, they are manually sorted, giving Berendsen insight into what they’ve received and how much manpower they will need to process the laundry. Berendsen needed a solution that allowed for the bulk reading of contaminated linens, enabling them to better plan the manpower needed to finish each job. They also wanted a solution that would scale in the future to meet other project needs. In the past, RAIN RFID solutions had been implemented in other Berendsen facilities to give better insights into laundry care. As bulk reading was the number one priority of the new system, a RAIN RFID solution, powered by Impinj technology, was implemented to analyze the bulk shipments arriving at the facility.

Berendsen partnered with IdentPro, a leading German asset tracking solution provider, to implement RAIN RFID gates at the receiving and shipping areas of the facility, as well as at the segregation line after the washing station. Each linen is tagged with a RAIN RFID tag, and each gate consists of an Impinj Speedway® Revolution reader connected to six Speedway® reader antenna hubs. As the bagged linens arrive at the facility, they pass through the RAIN RFID gate, which reads up to 400 tags at a time. The gates are shielded to help avoid false positive reads from nearby containers containing tagged linens. The RAIN RFID infrastructure is monitored and managed by IdentPro’s Control Unit identIQ; embedded RAIN RFID software filters and aggregates the data from the reads.

• [Cost Reduction - Management]
  Plan resources more cost effectively
• [Process Optimization - Real Time Asset Tracking]
  Ability to track each individual linen

• Doubled the speed at which Berendsen processes linens, increasing the number of linens processed per day to 15,000 units

• 99.9 percent asset visibility