Industrial laundries have spent years perfecting visibility over textiles. RFID chips in linen, automated sorting, piece level tracking. A single towel can now be followed across its entire working life. Yet the container that carries that towel, the trolley, the cage, the roll cage, often makes the same journey completely unseen.
This is the paradox at the heart of modern laundry logistics. The sector has near perfect sight of its cheapest asset and almost none of its most expensive one. According to Robert Tye, Chief Commercial Officer at ABS Laundry Business Solutions, that blind spot carries a cost that most operations never put a number on.
The industry can trace a two euro towel across its entire working life, yet often has no idea where a four hundred euro trolley is sitting today.
Containers are the forgotten asset class in the laundry supply chain. They are expensive, they move constantly between the plant and hundreds of customer sites, and they are rarely counted until a shortage, an audit, or a billing dispute forces attention. Treating container visibility as a core function, rather than a manual afterthought, turns a silent cost into measurable control. The Container Recording module within ABSSolute manages that visibility inside the laundry ERP, alongside deliveries, routes, production, and billing.
Every industrial laundry runs on movement. Between 30 and 300 tons of laundry can pass through a single plant each day, carried by fleets of trucks servicing hundreds of customer sites. At the centre of that flow sit the containers. They deliver clean product and return soiled goods, cycle after cycle, day after day.
Despite their role, containers are often the least tracked element in the entire operation. The reason is simple. Textiles were the obvious candidate for tracking technology, because textiles are the product. Containers were treated as packaging, and packaging rarely gets counted.
The financial reality tells a different story. A single trolley or roll cage can represent hundreds of euros of working capital. Multiply that across a fleet of hundreds or thousands, spread across sites that a laundry cannot see into, and the container pool becomes one of the largest uncounted assets on the balance sheet.
A container is not a logistics detail. It is working capital on wheels, and most laundries have never put a value on losing sight of it.
The cost of an untracked container pool is rarely a single dramatic loss. It is a slow accumulation of smaller problems that stay invisible until they combine.
The instinct, when a problem like this surfaces, is to buy a dedicated tracking tool. Robert Tye argues that this instinct is part of the problem.
The answer is not another gadget. It is visibility that lives in the same system that already runs deliveries, routes, and billing.
Within ABSSolute, container visibility is handled by the Container Recording module, built into the laundry ERP rather than added alongside it. It follows each container across six moments in its life cycle.
Because every one of these moments sits in the same system, the location of any container is known at any time, whether it stands at a customer, on a truck, in production, in the buffer zone, or under maintenance.
Visibility is the foundation. What it enables is a different way of running the container pool.
No separate system
Real time location
Circulation insight
On route flexibility
Hygiene proof
Dispute resolution
There is a further step that turns control into revenue. The Container Billing function applies charges based on time spent on site, delivery of containers and boxes, and quantities that exceed an agreed allocation, while rewarding prompt returns with credits. What began as a way to find lost assets becomes a way to bill fairly for them, and in some cases a new revenue stream in its own right.
While on holiday in the Cotswolds, Robert Tye noticed a laundry container positioned beside the wastewater treatment area of a countryside hotel. Curious, he took a closer look.
The container clearly displayed the branding of a well known UK commercial laundry. Instead of holding clean or soiled linen, it had been repurposed as a storage unit for water treatment chemicals. Its robust, weatherproof construction made it an ideal outdoor storage solution, though not one the laundry provider had intended.
This is a simple but powerful example of how valuable transport assets can gradually disappear from the laundry operation and be absorbed into a customer’s day to day activities. Without visibility, the laundry has no way of knowing where the container is or how it is being used, often only discovering the loss when a replacement is required.
With container tracking in place, the location of the asset and its prolonged presence at the site would have been identified, allowing the laundry to intervene before the container was effectively lost. Preventing just a handful of incidents like this can quickly justify the investment in asset tracking technology.
Container tracking is easy to file under operational convenience. Robert Tye sees it as something larger.
Knowing where every container is, and proving it has been cleaned, is no longer a nice to have. It is becoming a condition of doing business in regulated markets, and a foundation for running a leaner, more sustainable operation.
The pressure will only grow. Hygiene standards in healthcare and hospitality are tightening. Sustainability targets reward every asset kept in circulation rather than replaced. A container pool that is fully visible, well rotated, and demonstrably clean answers all three demands at once. The forgotten asset, it turns out, may be one of the most strategic.
Interested in bringing full visibility to the container pool?
See how container tracking works inside ABSSolute Infinity
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