In the linen laundry industry, the traditional laundry factories have relied on manual sorting and experience management for a long time, and face many pain points like low efficiency, high labor costs, large fluctuations in quality, and difficulty in problem traceability. These are all restricting the high-quality development of the industry. Nowadays, smart laundry factories are gradually breaking through the predicament of the traditional model and becoming an important direction for industry transformation by technologies, like chip recognition, automatic sorting and transportation, full-process data recording, and green energy application. 
Core Characteristics
● Efficiency, cost, and experience
The establishment of smart laundry factories should start from the requirements of customers and consider many goals. On the one hand, they should satisfy the hotel guests’ core experience requirements for the touch and cleanliness of the linen. On the other hand, they should meet the hotel managers’ operating requirements for improving laundry efficiency and precisely controlling costs. Using digital means to optimize the whole process from order to delivery and establishing a linen quality traceability system can ensure that the quality of each piece of linen is controllable and achieve a precise match between customer demands and factory operations.
● Data visualization
Data visualization is the key characteristic of the smart laundry factory, and it needs to connect the data collection and quantitative presentation links throughout the entire production process. Real-time capture and analysis of core production indicators such as water consumption, steam usage, and production capacity, as well as the washing data of each piece of linen (which can be recorded through the linen chip), help managers clearly understand the cost structure of each link and achieve refined management. This data-driven model makes the entire chain of linen from raw material entry to finished product exit transparent and controllable, and provides a scientific basis for decision-making.
● A fully traceable system
Smart laundry factories need to build a digital platform integrating “equipment – chemical materials – system” to achieve data sharing and full traceability. By this system, laundry factories can not only monitor the key parameters during the washing process in real time and ensure the stable, good washing quality of linen, but also directly show the cleaning process of the linen to the hotel guests and let them clearly know the details of washing, so as to trust laundry factories. Full traceability effectively solves the long-standing pain points in the industry, such as “uncontrollable quality and difficulty in tracing problems”, and improves the collaborative trust among the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.
● System compatibility
The establishment of a smart laundry factory is like assembling high-performance computers, which should focus on hardware equipment, management system, and external suitability. In equipment selection and system construction, people should choose the best solution based on actual business needs instead of blindly pursuing high-end configurations.
Though some pieces of laundry equipment are not the most expensive, they can form an efficient synergy with the system by designs like optimizing energy consumption ratio and reducing linen damage rate. This can instead create greater operational value for the factory and avoid resource waste caused by improper adaptation.
● Scientific management
The core of the smart laundry factory lies in using scientific management to replace traditional experience management and realizing high-efficiency synergy and transparent decision-making by a digital platform.
- Externally, they can establish an efficient transaction link with customers and synchronize the order progress and linen status in real time.
- Internally, it can achieve smart scheduling of the production process. Managers can get the production dynamics in real time, respond quickly to abnormal situations, and make the best decisions.
This scientific management model has broken down the information barriers of traditional factories and greatly improved the overall operational efficiency.
Practice in the Construction of Smart Laundry Factories
● Core of transformation
If traditional laundry plants want to transform into intelligence, they should break through two major points. The first is using intelligent tunnel washer systems, hanging storage bag systems, and other laundry equipment to realize automatic sorting of linen. This balances efficiency improvement and cost control. The second is building the green production line.
- Integrate large-scale sewage treatment equipment (e.g., 800-ton capacity units) and RO reverse osmosis pure water preparation devices.
- Combine wastewater recycling and advanced purification technologies to reduce water consumption per unit of linen washed by 40%.
- Equip with heat recovery systems to recycle waste heat from production, cutting overall energy consumption by 35%.
This forms a closed-loop management of “sewage treatment → water purification equipment → heat recovery,” and achieves a win-win situation for environmental protection and economic benefits.
● Upgrade of laundry equipment
The upgrade of laundry equipment should focus on reducing cost and improving quality and efficiency.
- Press design: reduce linen damage rates.
- Washing programs: 100+ different washing programs to meet the cleaning needs of different linens.
- Dryer humidity control: The humidity control function of dryers can ensure linen softness.
- Intelligent sorting system: help automatic linen classification and packaging.
Through these detailed innovations, manual intervention is reduced, and energy consumption and loss are lowered. Also, the equipment’s adaptability to smart factories is improved.
● Technological innovation
To address the issue that data interface is incompatible among different brands of laundry equipment, a cloud-based middleware system (e.g., an RFID middleware system) can be developed. This also helps data interconnection across multiple devices and systems.
Such systems need to support various programming languages and operating systems, and achieve accurate integration with mainstream laundry equipment (such as tunnel washers and washer-extractors of selected brands). This breaks down the data silos, ensures smooth end-to-end data flow, and provides technical support for intelligent management.
● Demand orientation
From the demand side, smart laundry factories need to be equipped with linen identification systems, production management systems, and logistics & transportation systems, and realize online management of end-to-end data.
This requires laundry factories to:
- Standard unification:
standards for washing processes and data collection
- Quality visualization:
provide customers with real-time access to key quality data
- Process Traceability
- Data management capabilities
to meet market demands for intelligent services and improve their own competitiveness.
Industry Outlook
Currently, smart laundry factories have moved from ideal to reality. Their transformation is reflected not only in the automation and digitalization of production methods but also in driving the systematic upgrading of the industry’s operation models. With the popularization of digital technology, data will become a core asset for laundry enterprises in operational decision-making. The level of collaboration between equipment and systems will directly determine an enterprise’s competitiveness in terms of efficiency, cost, and customer experience.
In the future, industry competition will focus on building stable and sustainable intelligent operation systems. The first to achieve end-to-end intelligent management and control will seize the initiative in industry upgrading.
Conclusion
CLM has a clearly defined positioning: Smart Laundry Factory System Integrator. We have a professional team dedicated to designing intelligent laundry factories and providing customers with intelligent laundry factory solutions. Also, CLM has identified laundry equipment for unmanned sorting, unmanned feeding, and unmanned distribution as new R&D directions.
We believe that the future laundry industry will become more intelligent, automated, and unmanned, and CLM will be at the forefront of this transformation.
Post time: Nov-06-2025