RFID-Based Automated Shared Drop Box for Laundry Business: A Process Model

Collection and delivery of laundry is an important process in the laundry business. The laundry businesses have adopted diverse models such as over the counter collection/delivery, online booking etc. The laundries are collected or delivered from customers’ doorstep or from customers’ desired location at a convenient time. In this paper, business process re-engineering concept has been incorporated to improve the collection and delivery process of laundry using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tagging and Automated Laundry Collection Drop Box. The Devil’s Quadrangle has been used as a tool for evaluation. The proposed model will result in reduction in cost, time and improvement in service quality. It ultimately results in customers’ loyalty, economic efficiency and gain of a competitive advantage over competitor. Other advantages for laundry business include automatic collection and delivery, enhanced customer convenience, enhanced flexibility and industry economic savings, enhanced customer satisfaction and decreased labor work. In the proposed automated laundry collection model, reputed laundry businesses will make a consortium and outsource collection and delivery process to a courier company. Different collection and delivery options are proposed in the model.

The advancement in technology has changed the aspects of every field. Before the 19 th century, household laundry was pretty laborious job. With introduction of electromechanical technologies, the labor work in household laundry has significantly decreased [4][5][6]. The utilization of technologies in internal operations of commercial laundry business provides good results compared with traditional laundry operations [7]. Internal operations not only include washing and ironing of clothes but also tagging, sorting, categorizing, record keeping, collection and delivery of laundry. RFID tag based hangers improve collection, tracking and delivery process efficient and are cost effective, by automating identification, sorting and grouping of laundry. Status of laundry can be tracked locally and remotely [8]. For identification and monitoring the status of laundry during laundry operations, barcode laundry tickets are also utilized [9].
Collection and delivery of laundry is an important process for the commercial laundry businesses and different models have been adopted for collection and delivery of the laundry such as over the counter service [10], pick/ drop the laundry from home [11], online booking and picking of laundry [12] and self-service KIOSK where customer puts/collects laundry in specified lockers [13].
For providing convenience and flexibility to customers, different models for process of collection and delivery of laundry have been adapted. In this study, different models for collection and delivery of laundry have been studied and a new model for commercial laundry business in Pakistan scenario has been proposed.
The core concern of the proposed model is B2B (Business The rest of this paper is divided into five sections. Section 2 discusses the related work and existing laundry system for collection and delivery of laundry. Section 3 shows the detailed analysis of the existing laundry methods used. Section 4 discusses the proposed model. Section 5 describes performance evaluation and limitation. Section 6 illustrates conclusion.

RELATED WORK
Washing soiled laundry is an everyday activity of human life either performed domestically or through laundry service providers [14]. Washing clothes domestically is a laborious job, during which considerable amount of water, energy, detergents and time is consumed. In a study conducted in Germany [15], it was estimated that 380 million-meter cube of water, 600,000 units of detergent and 5.5 billion kWh of electricity is consumed in the domestic washing of clothes. Washing of clothes consumes 12% of the total drinking water [16]. Pakistan is facing acute shortage of both energy and water [17]. engineering the process of collection/delivery of laundry for higher level laundry service providers as they offer quality cleaning service and observe industrial standards for treating waste. However; due to higher cost and lower reach-ability to middle class areas of the city, these business loose a big customer base. In this paper, the collection/delivery of the laundry process is re-engineered to enhance and boost business performance by providing convenience and flexibility to customer, which will increase the customer base.

Business Process Re-Engineering
Different methodologies have been adopted for enhancing/re-engineering business processes. Each practice is linked with its advantages and drawbacks, but the ''Devil's quadrangle'' is considered having more positive impacts on evaluating parameters of business processes like cost, quality, time and flexibility. It is used for the validation of re-designed business framework [26].
The devil's quadrangle methodology has been successfully used for the evaluation and validation of redesigning the "Purchase Request Process of TAM Iran Khodro Company" and gets significant improvements [27]. Devil's quadrangle is also successfully utilized when the processes of "Green Business Process Management" needs improvement in its different parameters including cost, quality and flexibility [28]. It is used for evaluation of measuring the performance of business process mining [29].
One of the only frameworks, which both, the industry and research believes is the best suited for performance evaluation of a workflow is the Devil's quadrangle [30].
Devil's quadrangle methodology is mostly used in re-designing business processes in business process reengineering. During re-engineering processes, different parameters i.e. cost, quality, time and flexibility are observed. The main focus of the said methodology is to decrease cost/time, while increase quality/flexibility in the re-engineered processes. The dimensions of time, cost, quality, and flexibility are interpreted differently at different maturity levels. It is not necessary that betterment in one of the mentioned dimension will lead to betterment of the other one as well for re-engineered process [31].

EXISTING PROCESSES FOR COLLECTION AND DELIVERY OF LAUNDRY
In commercial laundry business, the collection and for picking-up their laundry [33]. In the armed forces, industries and hospital, RFID-based laundry KIOSK with special software called CATAMARAN are used for periodic collection/delivery of laundry in an automated way [34].
Existing models for collection/delivery of laundry can be categorized as follows: (1) From customer doorstep

Over the Counter Collection and Delivery of Laundry
In this model, customer handed over the soiled laundry to representative of the laundry business at sales point (office or shop). After the receiving of laundry, the representative marks the laundry with suitable tags for identification, notes down any specific requirement of customer and issues a receipt note to customer in which number of laundries received and return date is mentioned.
Barcode tagging is implemented by some service providers, in this model, to automate the inventory process of laundry collection [32,37].
It is a traditional but inconvenient method for the collection and delivery of laundry, in which customer is required to follow the business hours of laundry service provider and there may be chances of occurrence of labor related errors.

Specialized Laundry Locker for Dropoff and Collection
Some laundry service providers offer specialized laundry locker facility to their customers on 24/7 availability. These specialized laundry lockers are great at providing convenience and flexible service for customers but they are available in only few selected areas of the city.

Analysis of the Existing Methods
Laundry procedure for receiving, cleaning and then returning to customers is pretty laborious and costly. For   Comparatively this process is inconvenient; as if a customer missed the trip then he/she has to wait for the next turn, which may cause disturbance in normal routine.
It also causes customer's inconvenience and may harm the goodwill and rapport of the laundry company. The laundry process as a whole is rigid and less flexible, which is the main cause of the inconvenience.
In the Laundry Model of Fig. 3   In theLaundry Model of Fig. 4, a specialized laundry locker has been utilized which can be opened through a PIN code assigned by the authorized company. Customers put their soiled laundry in the specialized laundry locker; laundry service representative collects it and after processing, put it back in the locker and generate SMS alert to customer for collection. The main drawback of this model is its rare availability, because it is available to only selected areas of the city.

Customer Module
The customer module deal with the issues directly related

RFID-Based Automated Shared Drop Box for Laundry Business: A Process Model
assigned to the customer. After acquiring Customer ID, family members of the customer will be added so they could also use the services. Each family member will be assigned sub-ID which belongs to main customer ID. All correspondence, order placing and payment detail will be executed using the customer unique ID. Customer ID and related information will be placed in shared database so that different laundry companies have access to this information.

Association of Clothes: After registration, customers
associate their clothes with their customer ID. In the proposed model, it is assumed that each laundry will be RFID tagged either by Garment Company or will be tagged by Laundry Company. The RFID tagged clothes will be associated to family members of the customer.

Courier Module
Laundry companies' consortium outsources the collection/delivery process to Courier Company.
Couriers Company will arrange placement of RFID based  After processing the soiled laundry, laundry company updates the status of laundry and Courier Company collects processed laundry from laundry companies. The processed laundry is then delivered to customers at their preferred/desired location.

Laundry Module
Laundry companies make a consortium and any laundry company could take membership.

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In occur. Transfer of objects from one place to another also becomes slow due to which many processes are lined up in queue. In the proposed model, each activity is allotted to the individual company who has experience or is working on the specified service independently. In this case the time needed for process decreases but flexibility and cost increases [47].

Limitations
There are same limitations in the proposed model for collection/delivery of laundry system. These limitations are outlined as following:  It is assumed that dropped soiled laundry is in normal condition in its all aspects; however, customer could drop their defected laundry into drop box as no representative of Laundry Company will check at time of dropping. This could cause dispute between customer and Laundry Company.  In case of damage or error in the drop box system, the whole laundry processes will be delayed. In case of off day/time of the contracted courier company, customers will not be served.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, a B2B solution based on RFID enabled shared drop box has been proposed for re-engineering of the laundry process of collecting soiled laundry and returning cleaned laundry. It provides efficient and easy laundry services to an extended area. The picking and dropping services are outsourced, that benefit both the laundry company and the courier company. The reengineered laundry processes are fast and economically efficient as compared to the existing systems. The model consists of shared drop box for numerous laundry companies, where customers have an open option to select any laundry company for processing their soiled laundry. Along with company selection, customers can select preferred laundry company along with the location where to be dropped via Courier Company. The location of each drop box is predefined in laundry company systems. Several additional enhancements will improve customer and industry economic savings, speed up the laundry process, increase customer satisfaction and decrease labor work.