My wife and I were traveling home last week from visiting family over Christmas and we started the usual post Christmas conversation. It always starts with ranting about eating too much(see cat) of my mother inlaw’s Louisiana cooking and an action plan to work it off. Inevitably our retrospective conversation inspires other home improvement topics like organizing clutter and managing the continuous flow of laundry demand.
In our house the laundry saga is always in a constant state of disarray. For years my wife and I have tried countless experiments to keep up with our laundry demand. We tried the single-ringable neck approach(PO), a schedule, and we even a kanban board with WIP limits. None have worked long term!
As my wife and I were discussing our past failures and current laundry dilemma, I started to think about how Lean principles might help expose some solutions. So I got my geek on and started consulting with my wife. As I started peppering her with situational questions a severe pain point emerged! Unbeknownst to me(probably why I’m not allowed to do laundry anymore ;-), we have six different types of work as it relates to our laundry. Before washing, the laundry must be sorted appropriately. The six different types of work are:
- Light delicates
- Dark delicates
- White regular
- Dark regular
- Light colored towels
- Dark colored towels
My wife mentioned that she spends a lot of time sorting. Of course, like any good root cause analyzer, I asked WHY. And she says…wait for it Lean enthusiasts…because she has to sort through the whole batch at one time! Boy was I relieved. I can handle large batch sizes. 😉
Laundry Buffers
Large batch sorting was such a pain that we began to do it less often. This led to piles of laundry overflowing from the baskets. Like any wise management initiative, we solved that problem by throwing more resources at it and getting another laundry basket. Of course that quickly filled up and we began finding other nooks and crannies in our house to establish laundry buffers. We were on the verge going to Laundry Anonymous!
The Solution
The answer was staring us in the face. We needed shallow queues(laundry backlog) and eliminate our laundry buffers. So we made a trip to the store and bought four small laundry baskets that do not exceed the capacity of our washing machine. One for each of the following: delicates, darks, lights, and towels(gets us most of the sorting as work enters the laundry queue). We also have a policy in place that as soon as one fills up, we throw it in the washing machine.
The shallow baskets have dramatically decreased the wait time for my favorite dress shirts and believe it or not, the throughput has picked up! What scientific data do I have to prove that??? A happy wife who spends less time stressing over trying to keep up with the laundry demand!
