DECEMBER 2013
Late News Crothall Laundry Services breaks ground in Calif. WAYNE, Pa. — Crothall Laundry Services has started construction on a new, stateof-the-art, 60,150-square-foot laundry facility in Manteca, Calif. Encompassing more than five acres, the new facility is projected to open in summer 2014 and will offer centralized healthcare laundry services to both Northern and Central California. Located within the CenterPoint Intermodal Center (CIC) in Manteca, the plant will be near several key transportation hubs. The building will be LEEDcertified, and have the capacity to process more than 55 million pounds of linen annually, Crothall says. “Crothall chose to locate within CIC-Manteca due to flexibility in the design and construction of our build-tosuit laundry facility. However, we are excited for several reasons about this new location,” says Crothall President Steve Carpenter. The facility will be the second ground-up, hightech, state-of-the-art laundry built by Crothall. Its last project, also engineered by Ian Bigelow, was an 82,950-square-foot plant in Oak Creek, Wis. “We are excited about being able to provide healthcare customers in the Northern and Central areas of California with laundry and linen service that is flexible, green and has state-of-the-art efficiencies, lowering costs for healthcare providers,” says Brian Dunn, national director of sales. ALN
Volume 39, Number 12
Alliance Laundry moves forward with $46 million expansion RIPON, Wis. — Alliance Laundry Systems is moving forward with a $46 million expansion project, less than two months after completing a production capacity increase, the company reports. The largest expansion in the company’s history, the project plans call for adding 106,000 square feet of space for manufacturing and assembly, says Alliance. The company anticipates breaking ground for the expansion in February, and expects the added production capacity to be online in the second half of 2015. Currently, its corporate campus in Ripon occupies five buildings on more than 58 acres, including two manufacturing plants, an engineering center and test lab, and distribution facilities, for a total of more than 1 million square feet. Alliance plans to immediately hire an additional 150 manufactur-
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry
ing and office staff to support the added capacity, the company says, while the majority of production employees will be hired in 2015. The project received final internal approval after Alliance had secured agreements with its union, the United Steelworkers Local 1327, the City of Ripon and Fond du Lac County. “Alliance makes the most reliable and durable laundry equipment available, and demand for our products keeps growing, both in the United States and overseas,” says Mike Schoeb, Alliance Laundry president and CEO. “Our core philosophy is to delight our customers with each and every interaction, provide the best products in the industry and excel in our service levels. The dedication of our people is what puts
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” — Neil Gaiman
“Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.”
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— Victor Papanek
number of laundry projects are completed around the country each year, resulting in brand-new or retrofitted plants primed and ready to convert soiled goods to clean textiles for the benefit of end-users and customers. But before a plant goes online, there can be months, even years, of project preparation. As a way to celebrate all the hard work that goes into designing, building and equipping a modern laundry plant, American Laundry News created this Designing Success feature to spotlight portraits of memorable plant installations. And so institutional/OPL, commercial and industrial laundry equipment manufacturers, as well as firms that offer design-build, engineering and mechanical contracting services, were invited to tout their latest and greatest projects of the past two years. Take a look at their tales, starting on page 12...
See ALLIANCE on Page 2
Coaching staff to save money, protect resources BY CARLO CALMA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT PHOENIX — All good sports teams rely heavily on the plays that their coach designs to not only win a game, but to have an overall successful season. The Association for Linen Management (ALM) recently hosted a webinar, Coaching Staff to Save Money and Protect Resources, to apply the same principle to laundry standards, and to detail what calls a laundry manager can make to provide staff a winning production strategy. Bob Corfield, president of Laundry Design Group, was the presenter. “Workplace coaching is
the process of equipping people with tools and knowledge to fully develop themselves [and] to affect their commitment to themselves, and [the] company,” he says.
Develop Coaching Skills Before diving into the coaching process, Corfield advises managers to self-assess their skills and “core competencies” in leading a group, adding that coaching is different than managing. “Coaching is a buy-in concept,” he says. “It’s … about identifying the team and/or the individuals that are around you [to] try to bring their skill level, as well as other capabilities, into the optimal position of being able to achieve
your outcome.” He adds that coaching is a learning process for many. “It’s not something that is intuitive to most people, it is not something that is easily learned,” says Corfield. “In some cases, you need to be trained and … then understand what your capabilities are going forward, looking at your coaching competency through feedback and ongoing coaching.”
Create a Game Plan The first step to successful coaching, according to Corfield, is having a game plan that has a clear view of the end goal. “Using a sports analogy, you have to communicate to the ownership what
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INSIDE Panel of Experts
What records should you keep to ensure you’re being productive?
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“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
your goals are and have to communicate to the people around you … so [you are] able to meet that goal,” he says. One aspect Corfield advises coaches and managers to be aware of in the game-planning process is the importance of being flexible. “No program, regardless of how well [you] designed it, is actually going to meet your overall goals without having a full understanding that you may have to … adapt to limitations within the context of a plan,” he says. “As much as a plan is a plan, it may not necessarily be the hard, fast and only rule to be able to get to that goal.” See COACHING on Page 11
The Newspaper of Record for Laundry & Linen Management
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Laundry Layout
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Many variables, conditions affect how to approach an OPL design.
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