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.

Every process has muda or waste.  The unnecessary materials, time, labor and effort that make things less efficient. Toyota identified seven major types of waste in business or manufacturing processes.  The main ones we will look at here are Waiting and Unnecessary Movements.  In this case, the unnecessary movements are the handling of the clothes during the process.  Every piece of clothing should be handled as few times as possible.

There are other aspects of muda in the laundry process such as Defects (stains that don't come out in the first wash) and Conveyance (laundry moving upstairs and down) but we won't address these here.  Renovating our home to put the laundry near the bedrooms is definitely outside the scope of this project.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  In the spirit of Plan-Do-Check-Act, we'll first map out the current process and future state.

CURRENT PROCESS

Really, what are we trying to accomplish?

Clean, appropriate (seasonal and occasion) clothes, available on demand to the user.

This process can accomplish this, but it also has many points where the clothes are gathered together and then resorted.  Gathered into a hamper and sorted by color.  Gathered in the washer and sorted to dry.  Gathered in a clean hamper and sorted when folded.  These steps are unnecessary movements.  Why gather the clothes only to separate them again?  And it isn't easy to untangle, and sort a heap of wet laundry.

The other source of waste comes in waiting between the wash and dry cycles due to machine availability.  The dryer stays idle while the washer finishes extending the total time for the process.

FUTURE STATE VALUE MAP

Here's what we want it to look like.

In Part Two, we'll look at strategies for eliminating the inefficiencies in the process.

So now Good Reader, it's your turn to weigh in.  What other sources of waste do you have in your laundry process?  What ideas do you have for making this process more efficient?