Faultless Linen – St Louis, MO

A Softrol PPS Helps A New Plant Operate Efficiently

Project Summary

Situation:  Faultless Linen invested a significant amount of money in a new plant with new equipment.  The plant was primarily staffed with newly hired employees and skill levels of those employees were unknown.

Objective:  Maximize worker efficiency as soon as possible to shorten the payback on their investment.

Results:  Softrol installed a PulseNet Productivity System (PPS) to report operator efficiency in real time.  Pounds Per Operator Hour (PPOH) increased 35% in the first four months of operation.   In addition, production supervisors no longer have to enter data for daily production reports and are now able to access these reports directly from the PPS reporting system.

Project Details

Faultless had just completed their new plant and wanted to rapidly maximize plant efficiency to realize a good return on their new investment.  Softrol Systems proposed a PPS system that monitored, in real time, output and employee efficiency on every piece of equipment on the clean side of the laundry operation.  Some previously established labor standards were utilized, and Faultless used the PPS system to fine-tune these standards.

At every workstation the employee inserted his or her smart card into the PPS module on that equipment.  This allowed the supervisors to monitor the performance of over to thirty employees in real time. A large screen monitor or “Message Center” was installed so that either the employee or the supervisors could easily see the performance of all employees at a glance.  Management could readily see which pieces of equipment were not working, working below standard, or creating a bottleneck.  This allowed management to make adjustments in the plant without waiting until the end of the day to see production results.

Any Faultless manager could also access the real-time PPS reports from their office PC and determine how efficiently the plant was running.  Faultless supervisors saved a significant amount of supervisory time by being able to glance at the Message Center and see the location and size of any production problem.  Further, the supervisors saved time by not having to write or enter data for management reports………….the PPS system automatically produced reports for daily production and daily worker performance.

Tim Higdon, Regional Manager, said “the PPS System has been a great tool in the dramatic increase in our PPOH from 90 to 140.  I’m a big fan of the system and Softrol’s support has been excellent!”