Fragmented responsibilities
For most hotels, textile management has traditionally been a collection of separate activities. Housekeeping makes sure there are enough textiles to service the rooms. Procurement buys replacements when stock becomes low. The laundry collects, processes and returns them. Finance pays the invoices. Periodically somebody counts what remains. Each activity makes sense on its own. The problem is that textiles do not experience them separately.
A sheet begins as something manufactured and purchased. It enters a hotel, moves to a room, is used, collected, sent to a laundry, washed and returned. It repeats that journey perhaps hundreds of times before eventually being damaged, lost, repurposed or withdrawn. It is one continuous lifecycle, managed through several disconnected processes. Perhaps that is what needs to change. Over the course of these articles we have questioned some surprisingly established assumptions about hotel textiles.
Rethinking familiar assumptions
Four PAR is useful, but it is not necessarily the amount a particular hotel needs. A shortage does not always mean more textiles need to be purchased. A stocktake can tell us what we have without telling us what we need. Laundry turnaround is not simply a service KPI; it determines how much inventory must exist in the system. The cheapest textile to purchase may not be the cheapest textile to use. And RFID, however powerful, does not solve any of these problems by itself.
We have also returned repeatedly to another distinction: ownership and control are not the same thing. A hotel can outsource textile ownership. It can outsource washing, transport and replacement. What it cannot outsource is its dependence on textile availability. And because the hotel ultimately pays for the textile system supporting its operation, including the stock that is inefficiently used or perhaps not used at all, it has a direct economic interest in understanding and controlling that system.
Connecting the operation
This leads us towards something broader than traditional textile management. We call it Connected Textile Management. The word connected obviously refers partly to technology. Giving individual textiles a digital identity makes movements, inventories and lifecycles measurable in ways that were previously impractical. But connectivity means more than putting an RFID chip into a towel. It means connecting inventory with consumption. Consumption with occupancy. Laundry turnaround with stock requirements. Loss with replenishment. Procurement with predicted future need. Individual textile lifecycles with sustainability. And eventually, hotels with laundries, manufacturers and recyclers through information that can follow the textile throughout its useful life.
Once those connections exist, the objective also changes. We stop asking only: What happened? and begin asking: Why did it happen? Then: What is likely to happen next? And eventually: What should we do about it? That progression, from visibility to understanding, from understanding to prediction, and from prediction to action, is perhaps the real opportunity.
Better management decisions
It also explains why Connected Textile Management should not be understood as another name for RFID. RFID is an enabling technology. Connected Textile Management is an operating philosophy. Its objective is not to track every towel for the sake of knowing where every towel is. Nor is it to minimise inventory at all costs, police laundries or replace the judgement of experienced hospitality professionals with algorithms. The objective is much simpler: to have the right textile, in the right place, at the right time, using the least resources reasonably necessary to achieve it.
For decades, achieving that depended heavily on experience, safety stock and sensible rules of thumb. They served the industry well because better information was difficult and expensive to obtain. That is no longer necessarily true. Textiles can now have identities. Their movements can generate data. Their lifecycle can become measurable. Future requirements can increasingly be anticipated rather than discovered when shelves begin to empty. The hotel textile has not changed very much. Our ability to understand it has. And that may be enough to turn something hotels have traditionally counted, purchased and washed into something they can genuinely manage.