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American Laundry News - August 2016

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AUGUST 2016

NEW YORK — The New York City Council passed the Clean Act (intro. 697) by a unanimous vote July 14, says a spokesperson for Council Member Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx). Torres introduced the bill in February 2015 in response to allegations of unsanitary laundry practices within the city. The legislation requires licensing for industrial laundries and establishes cleanliness standards when processing linens that restaurants, hospitals, hotels, and other businesses use. Torres’ office says that the bill will be signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio within 30 days of the Council’s vote. The bill will take effect 180 days after it is signed, according to Torres’ spokesperson. All industrial laundries that are currently not licensed by the city will have to apply to the Department of Consumer Affairs for a license when the law takes effect. All currently licensed laundries will be grandfathered in and will not be impacted by the law until their current license expires. The licensing fee and bond were kept the same as they have always been, the spokesperson says. Those amounts depend on the number of people a laundry employs. ALN

Volume 42, Number 8

Instantaneous laundry data means faster equipment, personnel corrections BY MATT POE, EDITOR CHICAGO — Halifax Linen Service Inc. provides laundry services for major medical facilities and large corporations, as well as small businesses, throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and surrounding areas. That’s a lot of linen to take in, process and get back to the customers, and Preston McElheney, president of Halifax Linen, says the company is committed to supplying the products necessary to meet or exceed the industry standards

expected in today’s professional business environments. With so much linen being processed, how can the company stay on top of it all, make sure that production is on track and performed properly, and the goods get to the appropriate places? Real-time reporting. “With real-time technology, we have access to what is needed, at all times, in a manner using the least amount of labor and manual intervention to pull data,” says McElheney. “In a non-real-time world, the consequences of inefficiency or the unexpected are noticed when they impact the customer or laundry, or the next day after the costs or pain have been felt,” says Simon J. Allen, senior vice president at See PROCESS on Page 6

Laundry in Transition:

Continuity in family business Planning, training are key to keeping a laundry business in the family and successful, says family business expert BY MATT POE, EDITOR ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The family business is the major player in the U.S. economy. According to the Family Business Review, 80% to 90% of all businesses in North America are family-owned. That number includes many laundry operations. The challenge is to keep the laundry business in the family. Justin B. Craig, Ph.D., clinical professor of Family Enterprise, co-

director of the Center for Family Enterprises, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, has dealt with many types of family business dynamics and transition issues. “If anybody ever suggests to you that family businesses aren’t good at succession, I encourage you to go back to them and say there is a reason for that and the reason is we don’t do it very often,” he says. “The public companies, they rotate their CEOs every three to

“THERE ARE A DIVERSE RANGE OF ISSUES YOU’LL BE FACING, DEPENDING ON WHERE YOU ARE IN THE LIFE STAGE OF THE BUSINESS...” —JUSTIN B. CRAIG, KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT five years. Here, you’re going at a much longer tenure and you stay around and you absorb the misery from these financial cycles and

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INSIDE Columnist at Large Eric Frederick shares skills managers, linen directors need.

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Real-time reporting can give laundry management a valuable snapshot of the plant’s operations. (Image licensed by Ingram Publishing)

these other shocks to the industry.” During the Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA) webinar titled Family Business Dynamics: Innovation in the Family Suite, Craig discussed transition planning for family-run laundries and how to train up the next generation. “There are a diverse range of issues you’ll be facing, depending on where you are in the life stage of the business and also the life stage of the family,” Craig says. “And, also, you’ll be at different levels of sophistication as far as your preparation for transition goes or your governance structures.” See FAMILY on Page 10

The Newspaper of Record for Laundry & Linen Management

[4]

Panel of Experts The experts tackle employee health, motivation in the summer heat.

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[16] PRODUCT

NYC Council passes Clean Act

Process improvement, savings achieved in laundries through real-time technology

SHOWCASE

Late News

LARGECAPACITY DRYERS

7/19/16 11:07 AM


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