CHICAGO — One completed cycle on a washer in your self-service laundry—known as a “turn”—may not seem like much on the surface, but it factors into a calculation that can play a huge role in illustrating your store’s busyness and efficiency.
American Coin-Op invited representatives from vended laundry equipment manufacturers to answer some questions about the performance metric known as turns per day and its place in self-service laundry operations and management.
Q: How does one calculate turns per day in a laundromat?
Michael Buzzard, senior manager of commercial laundry product development, Whirlpool Corp. (including ADC, Maytag Commercial Laundry and Whirlpool brands): It is the number of times you’re running your machines in a day but I think practically, more saliently, it’s really the number of revenue-generating machine starts per day. Not every start is necessarily a revenue-generating start, and typically what I think store owners are concerned with is revenue and return on investment.
It’s probably useful to consider both revenue-generating machine starts and overall machine hours or overall starts to understand how productive your equipment is, especially in an attended store where maybe your attendants are giving free vends to accommodate customers who may have issues or make an incorrect selection, something like that.
If you have a whole lot of free vends, just measuring the number of turns, the number of machine starts, is not going to give you an accurate picture of what your ROI is or could be.
Gary Gauthier, national sales manager, vended laundries, Pellerin Milnor Corp.: To determine turns per day (TPD), we need either washer and dryer revenues for one week or weekly cycle counts from all of the machines. If using revenues, monies need to be separated by class (or size/category) of machines.
One TPD is calculated by multiplying the vend price for each category of washer by the number of units in that category. If we take the total washer revenue for that category and divide that by the dollar amount of the TPD, we then get the number of turns per day for that category. Using cycle counts for the machines can take some of the math out of calculating TPD. Simply adding up weekly usage data for each category and then dividing that by seven will provide a TPD number for those machines. Of course, today’s computer controls and reporting systems can do all of this work quickly and easily.
Mike Hand, vice president of direct distribution, Alliance Laundry Systems (including Huebsch and Speed Queen brands): The simple formula is money in machine divided by vend price. Obviously, if you have cycle modifiers, it skews the calculation a little. This is where a laundry management system … gives you the number of starts.
Kevin Hietpas, director of sales, Dexter Laundry: A “turn” is simply one use of (a) washer. Turns/day for the whole store is just the total number of washer cycles divided by the number of washers.
Tod Sorensen, vice president of Girbau North America distributor Continental Girbau West: The simple math to calculate average turns per day (TPD) is to divide the number of turns by the number of washers. A more valuable and profitable calculation can be derived by breaking out average TPD/week by capacity/price category and by individual machine.
Q: Is it inherently more challenging for the owner of an unattended store to calculate turns per day than it is for the owner of an attended store? If so, why?
Gauthier: It depends on the equipment. Many machines have formula counters or other systems that allow even unattended stores to report wash cycle histories easily and quickly.
Hand: I don’t believe so. The process is the same regardless.
Hietpas: In an attended store, the attendant (or owner) can see which machines are getting the most use, and the owner can be more aware of levels of usage, i.e. more or fewer turns on certain machines. In an unattended store, the owner needs to watch collections more carefully — even to the point of collecting and counting by individual machine — or else utilize the capabilities of newer machine controls to keep track of levels of usage.
Owners with stores connected to [our cloud-based management software] can actually see number of uses in real time and for any period of time. This improved level of information takes all the guesswork out of calculating turns.
Sorensen: Not really because you can physically audit machines or get the number of turns through most store payment or management systems. Continental washers have a total turn audit feature for stores without a payment system. Lifetime by cycle and total cycles run are available directly from the washer control. From there, you can also drill down on how many of the “Extra” cycles … have been utilized.
Buzzard: It really just depends on how you’re auditing and how frequently you want to audit. … If you have third-party equipment on your machines that are, in Maytag’s case, Gen 2 capable, you can actually read the counter and revenue information for any payment method off the machine directly. You don’t necessarily need to attend your store at all in order to access that information. … If it’s coin only, I think it probably is more challenging as an owner, especially of multiple locations, to get at least daily or very frequent audits via manually auditing each machine.
Check back Tuesday for the next installment!
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