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British TLG company deploys RFID solutions to help achieve efficient management of hotel supplies
June 03 , 2021

The Manchester-based THE LINE GROUP (TLG) was established 34 years ago, mainly engaged in linen products and providing customers with product maintenance services. After the epidemic, TLG began to prepare for the reopening of their hotel customers, helping them manage bedding and hotel supplies.


On May 26, 2021, hotels across the UK reopened after the epidemic closed. They are facing the challenge of rearranging hotel supplies that are rarely used for months or even a year. The hotel needs to ensure the timely supply, service, and storage of bedding, and there should be no half difference due to artificial reasons. ,


The Lowry Hotel is a five-star hotel named after the artist Lawrence Stephen Lowry. The hotel has 165 rooms and has been in operation for 20 years. It caters to the needs of a customer base including actors and sportsmen. . The Lowry Hotel reopened on May 17, with an occupancy rate of approximately 50%. According to Adrian Ellis, general manager of Lowry Hotel, as the hotel business resumes, they will use the linen products provided by TLG, and plan to use the RFID system provided by the group to manage item data and automatically view The inventory of bed sheets, towels and other materials that need to be cleaned, so that you can know in time which supplies need to be reordered. Ellis said: "This should be very beneficial to our housekeeping work. Prior to this, all this was done manually. We need to manually count the sheets and other supplies, which is very inefficient and time-consuming. "


TLG’s general manager Tariq Salem said that as the business has grown in the past few years, they have begun to provide this service to hotel customers. The hotels that reopened after the epidemic closed for a long time began to plan to improve efficiency. Through TLG products to read the label on each linen item used by the hotel, the hotel can access the data about the hotel inventory in the cloud-based software, and then according to Need to place an order. Ellis explained that they will spend less time calculating and organizing hotel supplies, and spend more time serving customers.


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Salem said that in the years before the epidemic, the scale of TLG's services showed exponential growth. In 2017, the company provided a total of 570 rooms for hotels, but by 2019, it has increased to 2,895 rooms, all based on mutual recommendations between customers.


As the company grew, TLG invested in more equipment to automate the process and improve efficiency. Salem said he saw the advantages of using RFID to automatically identify thousands of linens, whether they are clean or dirty, or even those packed in bags. When you only have 500 rooms, you can rely on your staff, but larger hotels are slower to adopt this manual counting method. Part of the reason is that many hotels have a lot of supplies to deal with but they usually don’t. Count the quantity of these supplies. Since there is no way to automatically identify large and small items, companies usually have to write off a certain percentage of supplies every year as a loss. He said that for TLG, whether for its own purposes, or for customers who expect to provide guests with clean bedding, this is not a tenable strategy.


Therefore, the company began experimenting with this technology around 2016. It acquired an RFID solution from Amsterdam-based laundry service software company ABS Laundry Business Solutions, which consists of RFID tags sewn on linen and a reader channel. The system is equipped with cloud computing-based software to manage the collected reading data. Items with RFID tags pass through the RFID reader antenna in the channel. Hand-held and desktop readers can also be used to capture the tag ID. TLG sewed the labels on its own linen products. So far, 27,1400 items have been equipped with RFID tags.


The workflow of the solution is:


First, the items that need to be cleaned will be transported to the laundry. Then, the items will pass through a reader channel, where the reader will capture the tag ID and transmit it to the software to update the status of each tag. The items will then be placed in the waiting area, and the RFID reader installed on the ceiling of the waiting area also captures all the tag IDs of the items in the waiting area, so as to check the gaps.


After the items are cleaned and folded, the staff uses the desktop UHF RFID reader to capture the tag IDs of all the cleaning items being packaged to complete the customer order. They can check the order on the PC running the software, and they can also use a handheld reader to capture data and direct which items should be on which transport truck.


Salim predicts that the use of RFID will help companies resume operations. During the shutdown, the company visited customers’ facilities and updated their inventory data status so that the system knew which products were not in use, and were therefore not affected by daily wear and tear. He said that the hotel is now refurbishing linens that have not been used in the past year.


This work will be very busy, but if you can see the screen to know the status of all items, it will be beneficial to us and our customers. The RFID system solution not only makes the counting more efficient and accurate, but also reduces the number of customer service consultation calls. In the past, we had to send people to the site to count after receiving customer calls. Now we only need to help them update the system inventory.


Salim said: “If there is any problem, the service staff can simply bring a handheld reader to the customer’s hotel and scan the storage room on each floor. As the company continues to develop its customer base, this is even more beneficial. We don’t have to Hire more service staff, because the inventory is now faster and more efficient."


In the future, TLG intends to add more RFID readers to its facilities, so that starting from the reader at the entrance of the washing system, it can learn about the items that are undergoing all cleaning service steps in real time.


Ellis said that this year's market will be somewhat sluggish, and the tourism industry has only recovered about 50%, but he expects that business will fully recover in 2022 or 2023.

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