From anonymity to identity
For most of its life, a hotel textile is effectively anonymous. A bath towel is a bath towel. One sheet is largely indistinguishable from another of the same specification. We may know how many were purchased, how many kilograms went to the laundry yesterday or approximately how many remain in stock, but the individual article itself has no history.
Give that textile a unique identity and something fundamental changes. We can begin to distinguish this towel from every other towel. At first, the obvious benefit is counting. If every article can identify itself, inventories become faster and movements become easier to record. But counting is probably the least interesting thing we can eventually do with that identity.
An individual history
Imagine a towel entering circulation for the first time. From then onwards, we can potentially know when it leaves the hotel, when it returns from the laundry, how many times it has completed that cycle, how long it typically remains outside the property and, eventually, when it stops appearing altogether. One identity gradually becomes a history. And when thousands of individual histories are combined, they begin to describe the operation.
Perhaps one type of towel consistently survives considerably more laundry cycles than another. Perhaps textiles processed by one laundry have a different useful lifespan from identical textiles processed elsewhere. Perhaps certain articles disappear disproportionately quickly. Perhaps one hotel requires substantially more circulating stock than a comparable property. These are no longer tracking questions. They are management questions. Individual identity also allows us to start connecting information that has traditionally existed separately.
Connect information across organisations
Procurement knows what was purchased and what it cost. The manufacturer knows what the textile is made from and how it was produced. The laundry knows how it was processed. The hotel knows how it was used. Sustainability increasingly wants to understand how long it lasted and what happened when it reached the end of its useful life. Today, much of that information stops at the boundary between one organisation and the next. A persistent textile identity creates the possibility of connecting it. This matters whether the hotel owns the article or rents it.
In an owned model, the hotel can understand the performance of an asset it purchased. In a rental model, the hotel may never own the textile, but it still benefits from understanding the performance of the textile pool providing its service. Again, ownership and control are separate questions. There is also an important distinction between identity and location. Knowing that a particular towel was last detected at the laundry is useful. But the real value of giving it an identity is not simply being able to ask: “Where is this towel?”
Identity serves better decisions
It is being able to ask: How long has it been in circulation? How many times has it been processed? Is it behaving normally? How does its performance compare with similar articles? When is it likely to need replacing? What can its history teach us about the next towel we purchase? And eventually, perhaps, what materials does it contain and what should happen to it when its useful life is over? This is where connected textiles begin to become much more interesting than RFID.
RFID is one way of giving the physical article a machine-readable identity. But identity is the foundation, not the objective. The objective is to turn thousands of otherwise anonymous objects moving through a hotel into information from which better decisions can be made. A towel with an identity is still just a towel. But ten thousand towels with identities, histories and relationships begin to look like something else entirely. They begin to look like a manageable system.