Visibility before lean inventory
Just-in-time sounds like a slightly dangerous expression to use in a hotel. Nobody wants Housekeeping waiting for a delivery truck before it can make the beds. And that is not what we mean. Hotels need safety stock. Laundry deliveries get delayed, occupancy changes and demand is never perfectly predictable. Removing those buffers in pursuit of theoretical efficiency would be a terrible idea. But there is an interesting principle behind just-in-time supply chains that textile management could borrow: produce and replenish according to actual demand rather than periodically guessing what demand might be.
Today, textile purchasing is often quite disconnected from textile consumption. A hotel establishes a target stock, conducts inventories, identifies a shortfall and eventually places an order. In other cases, requirements are estimated during the annual budgeting process, months before anybody knows exactly what occupancy, losses or textile consumption will actually look like. The supplier enters the process relatively late.
By the time an order arrives, it may suddenly need to manufacture several thousand articles, perhaps with a specific hotel specification, embroidery or branding. Production needs scheduling. Raw materials need securing. Transport needs organising. The hotel therefore protects itself with stock. The supplier protects itself with lead time. Both responses are perfectly rational because neither side has particularly good visibility of what the other will need in the future. But imagine a slightly different model.
Making future demand visible
A hotel has 4,000 bath towels today. It knows how quickly that stock has been declining, what its expected occupancy looks like and the minimum level it wants to maintain. Instead of waiting until stock reaches that minimum, it can estimate that in five months it will require approximately 600 replacements. The supplier does not yet have an order. But it has something almost as useful: visibility of future demand. Now extend that across fifty or a hundred hotels.
Instead of receiving unpredictable orders for 3,000 towels, 1,500 sheets and 800 bathrobes, a manufacturer could begin to see demand forming months before the purchase orders arrive. That could change more than hotel procurement. Manufacturers could plan production more efficiently. Raw-material requirements could become more predictable. Hotels might reduce the amount of stock they hold simply to protect themselves against long lead times. Emergency orders could become less frequent. And purchasing could move gradually from large periodic replenishments towards smaller, better-timed ones. For rental textiles, the principle is equally interesting.
Connecting rental pools
The laundry effectively becomes part of the supply chain between manufacturer and hotel. If it can see that a customer’s textile pool is approaching a future requirement, replacement stock can be planned before the hotel experiences a shortage. The hotel still benefits because it ultimately pays for the number of textiles required to provide the service. This does not require perfect forecasting.
Planning with uncertainty
Forecasts will be wrong. Occupancy changes, hotels alter standards, textiles behave unexpectedly and extraordinary events occur. The objective is not to predict exactly how many pillowcases a hotel will require 173 days from now. It is simply to replace no visibility with useful visibility. And perhaps that is where connected textiles eventually become much more interesting than tracking.
If information about actual consumption can move upstream through the supply chain, the textile manufacturer no longer needs to know only what the hotel ordered yesterday. It can begin to understand what the hotel is likely to need tomorrow. We are probably some distance from hotel textiles operating as a true just-in-time supply chain. But the first step is surprisingly simple. Before connecting the purchase order to the supplier, connect the need.