CHICAGO — Imagine that there are three extra steps a worker has to take between taking a garment from a press to the next station in the process. In the bigger picture of the entire plant, three steps might not sound like much.

Now, multiply those three steps by 300 garments a day, then multiply that by the number of employees. Take into account three-step inefficiencies with other workstations and you see how quickly wasted motion adds up. Over the course of a year, these “minor” inefficiencies can translate into thousands of dollars.

This is the hidden cost of poor plant layout, and it’s something many drycleaning companies live with because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

“Steps add nothing but cost to a product,” says Bill Stork, owner of Dry Clean Design and recently retired plant layout consultant whose family connection to the industry dates back to his grandfather’s business in the early 1920s.

For drycleaning operations facing tight labor markets and rising costs, workflow optimization isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity. The good news? Even small adjustments to plant layout can yield significant improvements in efficiency, capacity and employee satisfaction.

Drycleaning consultant Liz Davies has been working with owners in designing their plants for nearly 30 years. She sees the impact of poor workflow regularly in her clients’ operations.

“If one person has to take 10 steps forward and 10 steps backward every single time, and they’re doing 300 pieces a day, how many minutes is that?” Davies asks. “By increasing just two more pieces an hour times 10 people, that’s a lot of labor cost saving per day.”

The mathematics tell the story. Davies recently worked with a client to optimize its cotton-linen pressing area. By adjusting the layout and improving workflow, it reduced staffing from five pressers to three while maintaining the same output. The key, says Davies, was increasing each presser’s pieces per operator hour (PPOH) from eight to 11 or 12 through better equipment placement and eliminating unnecessary movement.

And there’s more to a well-thought-out plant design than simply saving steps. A poor workflow can create bottlenecks that not only slow production but frustrate employees and cause quality control problems. For instance:

• Garments might pile up at quality inspection because the layout doesn’t allow for proper flow.
• Poor equipment spacing might force operators to handle the same garment multiple times or take extra steps between pressing stations.
• Employees might have to navigate around equipment or carry items for long distances, which cuts into productivity while raising the risk of injury.

“A lot of times it’s ergonomics,” Davies says about inefficiencies. “We don’t like dealing with workers’ comp issues.”

When Stork evaluated physical plants during his consulting career, he searched for specific problems that hurt overall workflow.

“I looked for bottlenecks,” he says. “Places where time got wasted or (was) ill-spent. We then tried to take measures to eliminate those issues.”

The most critical issue: workflow lines that cross. Stork distinguished between items that could travel anywhere (garments in wheeled buggies) versus items on fixed paths (garments on slick rails or conveyors).

“If it’s on a hanger, on a slick rail or on a conveyor, it cannot go just anywhere at any time,” Stork says. “The design of the plant has to account for the motion.”

When workflow lines cross, this either creates bottlenecks or requires complex switchback systems that waste time. Davies sees similar issues, particularly at quality control stations where pressed garments get jammed up because lines aren’t long enough for proper inspection.

Her solution? Installing trolley systems on rails. This allows pressers to load garments and just slide them down the line without manual pushing. 

“To me, it’s common sense,” she says.

Another common mistake Davies says she encounters is plants that rely on wheeled Z racks to move finished garments because they haven’t designed proper rail systems.

“Z racks are a tripping hazard,” she says. “They also take a lot of space.”

Come back Thursday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll look at what makes for the “ideal” path through a plant, along with the importance of paying attention to details.