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: Can the turns per day metric tell a store owner when certain machines may be underperforming and that shifting the equipment mix in some way may be needed? If so, how?
Tod Sorensen, vice president of Girbau North America distributor Continental Girbau West: Yes, if certain sizes are getting more activity, an owner might want to purchase more of that size. Let the customer tell you. Also, it’s interesting to track turns in terms of number of self-service turns versus the number of full-service wash/dry/fold or commercial account turns. This tracking can also help in determining which machines you can increase (modify up or down) the vend price or utilize automatic time-of-day or -week pricing specials.
Michael Buzzard, senior manager of commercial laundry product development, Whirlpool Corp. (including ADC, Maytag Commercial Laundry and Whirlpool brands): If you find specific capacities or platforms that don’t perform, regardless of placement, regardless of promotion, it may just be the case that it’s not the right solution for your customers. That footprint could be met with other capacities or platforms, and in that case, I think it does start to make sense to consider shifting your machine mix.
Gary Gauthier, national sales manager, vended laundries, Pellerin Milnor Corp.: I’ve generally recommended that TPD should be closely monitored, particularly in a store’s first year, as a way to provide the most effective vend strategy for the business. Machines that aren’t being used enough might be overpriced and an overly busy bank of machines might be losing profits for the owner.
Mike Hand, vice president of direct distribution, Alliance Laundry Systems (including Huebsch and Speed Queen brands): Yes, in some cases, they may need to add additional large-capacity washer-extractors. We have, on occasion, put larger equipment in on a rental program to validate—through the turns-per-day figure—the purchase of higher-capacity models. Showing the laundry owner that if they have these larger machines available, and customers use them, it’s worth the investment.
Kevin Hietpas, director of sales, Dexter Laundry: Absolutely! This is probably the best use of the turns/day metric. Usage is our customers’ way of telling us what they want, or where they see their best value. If a store has significantly different usage between different sizes of machines, it’s a signal that your location might need more of a different size of machine, or that you may be overpriced, or underpriced, on a certain size of machine. Understanding the difference in turns between sizes is a great starting point for most owners.
Q: Can you describe how turns per day can be used to show today’s revenue and utilities usage in a laundromat and forecast them for the future?
Buzzard: If you’re in a stable market and you have pretty consistent traffic—there may be a little bit of seasonality in your usage—I think you’re looking at more of a weekly profile than a very long run. … Revenue is a function of your turns and pricing, obviously, and so your revenue is going to be dependent both on how many revenue-generating turns each machine experiences in a period of time and also the effect of pricing. That’s for each machine.
At a store level, you’re taking each machine’s performance and adding those together, so it’s turns times pricing … for each machine and then added for all machines in a location to get your overall daily revenue. Understanding your turns profile and your average pricing gives you a pretty good picture, based on turns, of what you can expect in revenue in any period.
Gauthier: I’ve met store owners whose record keeping was so careful that they could compare their TPD data to water bills to determine if they had even minor leaks in drain valves or other plumbing fixtures. If water usage was creeping up with steady TPD, they started looking for leaks.
Hand: Forecasting of utilities is tough. As a laundry owner, you are at the mercy of the utility companies. You can collect daily and break down turns per day, but without a reporting service, there really isn’t a way to break it down daily.
The conclusion arrives on Tuesday!
Missed earlier parts of this article? You can read them here: Part 1 – Part 2
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