Process Improvement - Laundry Day Part 2

Welcome back to our foray into Laundry Day.  We're going to continue with the PLAN phase of our process improvement.

As a recap, let's take another look at the Future State of our Laundry Day process..

 

We'll begin our next step by looking at the most labor intensive steps and see where we can reduce unnecessary movements.

Process Improvement - Laundry Day Part 1

People told me babies created laundry.  I didn't understand how this was possible.  Baby clothes are so tiny, how could it be a lot of extra laundry.  I now understand.  Its not just little sleepers, its loads of wash cloths, receiving blankets and bibs.  Plus extra adult clothes for the barrage of drool and spit-up endured daily.  There is a lot of laundry.

Living in an area with time of use electricity billing, I try to confine laundry to cheaper off-peak hours.  This typically means all laundry gets done on one day of the weekend.  That means fitting a lot of laundry into as little time as possible.

I am also a laundry fanatic.  I firmly believe if the tag says hang to dry, you hang to dry.  If it is wash in cold, you wash it in cold.  If you are a person who crams as much as possible into one load and dries everything as hot and as quickly as possible, this will not help you.  But don't be surprised if your new pants are an inch shorter than in the store, your white shirt is now pink and your black sweater barely passes for charcoal grey anymore.

So how can we improve the process of laundry day?  To begin our kaizen, we'll start with the classic tome, Jeffery Likers' The Toyota Way.

Household Efficiency 2.0

I'm an Operations Manager at my core.  From production facility setup to product line launches to ERP implementations, every one bringing its own challenges and rewards.  I love to solve problems and I have a compulsive need to make things work better.  I've spent many years building my toolbox of skills and resources and read about operations management for fun.

Late last year, my husband and I welcomed a little bundle of joy into our lives and my whole world changed.  To start with, I'm home full time for a year looking after our little Monkey.  My days are filled with diaper changes, nursery rhymes and loads and loads of laundry.

Now having survived the blurry-eyed first almost-six-months of my child's life, and being a born Ops Manager, I began to think of ways to streamline my day, increase efficiency, boost productivity!  Inventing a real life "Rosie the Robot" seemed cost prohibitive, so instead I went back to basics. The first principals of lean manufacturing, supply chain and operations management had to work at home.

Christine Frederick
Source: http://www.startribune.com/
local/blogs/189534231.html

This is not a new concept, it is in fact a very old one.  In my research, I stumbled upon "The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management" written by Christine Frederick in 1913.  Frederick was inspired by the industrial revolution and scientific management and applied the principles to her own home.  Her goal was to reduce the drudgery of house work, improve the working conditions of both homemakers and servants.  She also hoped to inspire young women who were embracing their new social freedoms to continue to find value in the work of a wife and mother.  More on Frederick's work later.

Here's the disclaimer - this is not a parenting guide, far be it for me to tell you how to raise your kids.  Nor is it Professional Engineering advice.  Nor is it a feminist manifesto on the drudgery of homemaking.

This is a tongue-and-cheek personal view of the world.  Enjoy, comment and explore the wonderful intersection of homemaking and industrial engineering.

Well, nap time seems to have ended.

More posts to follow.