CHICAGO — While there are similarities in the way every drycleaning company operates, each one has its own policies and procedures that separate it from the competition, making it a distinct entity.
This is why many cleaners believe it’s important to create documents that communicate this vital information to team members and allows both new and existing employees to have their questions answered.
‘What Makes Us Unique?’
While gathering the pieces and processes that make a company unique might not be an easy task, it’s a worthwhile one, says Amy Wischmann, policies and procedures manager at Benzinger’s Clothing Care, located in western New York state.
“I think, particularly in the drycleaning industry, people still struggle with how to capture that kind of information,” she says. “How do they document what they know? How do they transfer that knowledge? I do think the techniques for doing that have evolved because we have so much more access to technology that can help with that. I think the tools have evolved, so that’s a good step in the right direction.”
“When I first started, back in the 1980s, lots of people didn’t even have a staff manual,” says Jan Barlow, owner and president of Jan’s Professional Dry Cleaners in Clio, Michigan.
“If you didn’t document it, then you weren’t going to be held accountable to a process, which is exactly why we do it now, so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself over and over.”
In Barlow’s case, she started gathering best practices from industry and cost groups and then applied those lessons to her own operation and captured those processes.
“I just kept trying to make sure that I documented how to do things and was able to pass on the information,” she says. “For me, it was the repetition factor — not only was I saying it, but I could show them a piece of paper that made it more legitimate.”
Over the years, Barlow evolved her process documents and, as finding quality employees grew more difficult, they became more important to her business. When the pandemic hit, her documentation changed the game.
“That really confirmed to me that having all my standard operating procedures and making sure that everybody knew what was going on was critical,” she said. “Now, with the advent of video cameras, social media and technology, you have a thousand different ways you can get educated on how to do things right and find your best practices.”
First Things First
So, what are the topics such process documents should address first?
“Our production manual starts, literally, with how our day begins,” Wischmann says. “‘This is what has to be done at 6 a.m. This is how you fire up the boiler,’ with pictures. This way, if a critical employee is missing, someone knows what to do. If no one in your building knows how to turn on your boiler, nothing’s going to happen that day — the subsequent tasks aren’t going to help much.”
Barlow has a similar philosophy.
“When I started hiring new people, about five or six years ago, we literally started taking videos of how to blow down the boiler, so that everybody knew,” she says. “We have every single piece of equipment videoed in our store about how to turn it on and off so that anybody could come in and figure out how to start up the plant and how to turn everything off.”
Come back Thursday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll examine company-specific information that should go into process documents and how to best present them.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
