WASHCO transform the laundry operations at Jewish Care, addressing their challenges with dependable, personal, and responsive service across their nine care homes and four retirement living schemes. The tailored solutions resulted in a reduction in annual laundry spend and enhanced operational efficiency.

Requirement:

Jewish Care is the largest health and social care organisation serving the Jewish community in London and the South East. Having encountered several challenges with their previous supplier, they were keen to explore their options for a new commercial laundry partner to work with them across their nine care homes and four retirement living schemes.

As part of their wish list, Jason Cloete, Head of Food and Beverage at Jewish Care, highlighted that the organisation was looking for “a dependable laundry partner who understood and cared about the needs of our business.” They also needed transparency and full visibility of their machines, complete with audit trails.

With their previous solution, many homes were experiencing frequent breakdowns and were disappointed in the levels of service received on these occasions, making this a crucial requirement to resolve with their new chosen supplier too.

Solution:

Tailor-made service

It was important that WASHCO fully understood the requirements and challenges of the individual laundries from the outset, which particularly impressed Jason Cloete: “Right from the start, the meetings were always attended by the right people. They gathered all the information they needed.”

This process involved carrying out site surveys at each campus, during which areas for improvement were identified and agreed with Jewish Care. These included:

• Upgrades to ducting at a number of sites
• Bespoke colour match to exterior ducting to blend seamlessly with properties
• Relocation of internal ducting to reduce levels of cold air blown directly towards staff

Complete visibility of processes

Following recommendations and discussions, a combination of WASHCONNECT and Miele Little Giants equipment was agreed. WASHCONNECT could provide Jewish Care with the audit trails required to confirm thermal disinfection had been achieved in their cycles, along with data collection and analysis features that keep track of energy and water usage.

Seamless installation

In total, 52 machines were installed on a staggered schedule over a 2 month period, minimising any potential disruption. Jason Cloete described the process as being handled “so smoothly and efficiently”, adding: “I can only praise the people involved. I had a sense right from the beginning that we were in safe hands. There was a lot to navigate around, including entry times and entry points, and it was just faultless. It’s very rare you can say that!”

Following installation, training was carried out with the management team to get them up to speed with the CONNECT portal, which would give them complete visibility of their laundry processes from start to finish.

Results:

With their new laundry solution, Jewish Care have:

• Reduced their annual laundry spend by 14%
• Improved processes across all sites
• Gained complete visibility of laundry operations, including energy and water usage
• Introduced new tailored programmes, developed and installed remotely