Every year on April 21, World Creativity and Innovation Day invites organisations around the world to reflect on the role of fresh thinking in the work they do. At ABS Laundry Business Solutions, this day resonates deeply, because creativity and innovation are not confined to a single team or department. They are part of how every colleague approaches their work, every single day.
Every department, the same principle
In product development, our teams continuously question what the next version of our software should look like, not just in terms of features, but in terms of how a laundry manager thinks and works. In software development, the challenge is finding solutions that are not just functional but genuinely elegant. In marketing, it means finding the story behind the numbers. In sales, it means listening carefully enough to understand what a prospect needs rather than what they said they needed. In customer support and project management, it means being the person who notices that a customer’s real obstacle is not the one they called about.
None of this requires a special title or a dedicated innovation budget. It requires curiosity, and the confidence to act on it.
What that looks like in practice
When our product team began developing ABSSolute Infinity, the new generation of our ERP platform, the first question was not what to build. It was where the real value for our customers sat. The answer was the production floor: the place where linen is registered, sorted, weighed, and scanned, and where small improvements in usability translate directly into measurable efficiency gains.
Rather than rebuilding everything at once, the team focused on the 80% of the market that works with linen, garments and residential, and started there. The result is a platform that does more with less: cleaner screens, fewer steps, and an interface intuitive enough that a new operator can find their footing without a manual.
“By innovating, we stay attractive to the market. If we stopped innovating, we would lose our leading position. We are market leader and we intend to stay that way.”
Rob Helsen – Chief Product Officer at ABS Laundry Business Solutions
The same principle that guided the architecture of Infinity, building something smarter rather than just bigger, also opened revenue streams that never existed before. Billing models that were not possible in the previous platform are now standard features.
Why this matters for industrial laundry
Running an industrial laundry operation is complex. Managing linen flows, tracking deliveries, controlling costs, ensuring compliance across multiple sites, these are not simple challenges. And the margin for meaningful improvement is larger than most people assume.
County Linen, an ABS customer since 2017, is a clear example of what happens when an operation starts asking better questions about how its systems work together. By connecting ABS with external platforms including customer portals, CRM tools and reporting systems, data now flows across the entire business without manual input. The Business Intelligence module sits at the centre of their daily dashboards, supporting decisions at both operational and management level. What started as a search for a more structured platform became the foundation for a genuinely integrated operation.
That kind of transformation does not come from software alone. It comes from a willingness to look at familiar processes differently.
What ABS brings to that
We do not just celebrate innovation internally. We support it within the industrial laundry operations we work with. When our teams sit down with a customer on an implementation, a process review, or a challenge they have been carrying for months, we bring genuine curiosity to that conversation. We ask the questions that sit just outside the scope of the support ticket. We think about what a workflow could look like, not just what it currently is.
That collaborative spirit is at the heart of how ABS works. We are not just a software provider. We are a partner in the ongoing effort to make industrial laundry operations smarter, more efficient and more resilient.
April 21
World Creativity and Innovation Day falls on April 21. At ABS, we think the most meaningful way to mark it is not with a statement but with a question: where is the next improvement hiding, and who is going to find it?
In our experience, it is rarely where you expect.
