We get it -- the up front inventory process can be daunting. Using SimSort will revolutionize your laundry tracking process over the long term, and like every long journey worth taking you have to start with a single step. The good news is that this first time inventory process only needs to be done once.
We recommend you work neighborhood by neighborhood. Set up in a small meeting or dining room in the neighborhood if you can, with areas for receiving a bellman cart of clothes, tagging clothes, and adding clothes to the SimSort app inventory. There should be space in between the tagging and inventory areas for a backlog of tagged items.
Then work room by room. Use a rolling cart to bring items into your inventory area. If you have 2 or 3 staff, you can have one person tagging, one inventorying, and one person moving items. Clothes should flow from the cart, to the tagging station, to the inventory station, and back to the cart.
Working room by room and making sure all the clothes in your work space belong to the same resident helps make sure you assign all items to the correct resident. Once an entire batch of clothes is done and back on the cart, the cart can be returned to the resident's room.
On average, the whole process takes about 2 minutes for each piece of clothing. With 2 or 3 staff working, you should be able to inventory 5 to 6 residents per day.
The good news is there's no real time limit on how long it needs to take. The more you inventory, the more the Simsort system can help you, so it's worth doing even if it takes you several days or weeks to complete.
