How laundry and dyeing enterprises can develop into modern service industries

――Interview with Wen Lisheng, Director of the Expert Committee on Laundry and Dyeing Industry of the China General Chamber of Commerce

Professor Wen Lisheng currently serves as the Director of the Expert Committee on Laundry and Dyeing Industry of the China General Chamber of Commerce, Deputy Director of the Expert Committee of the China National Garment Association, Deputy Director of the National Garment Engineering Center, Deputy Director of the National Garment Industry Productivity Promotion Center, Chief Engineer of China National Garment Group, and Professor at Donghua University. Recently, Professor Wen has paid great attention to how China's laundry and dyeing industry can develop into a modern service industry while participating in the research for the national "12th Five-Year Plan" for the revitalization of the garment industry. This article is compiled based on the interview content, hoping to resonate with the benevolent and wise in the laundry and dyeing industry.

As is well known, our laundry and dyeing industry is one of the most traditional service industries. With the end of the "National 11th Five-Year Plan" and the arrival of the "National 12th Five-Year Plan," the task before us is how to quickly develop traditional laundry and dyeing enterprises into a modern service industry under our current favorable environment and existing foundation.

The so-called modern service industry refers to industries that do not produce goods or commodities. The currently widely accepted definition is: "The modern service industry arises alongside the development of information technology and the knowledge economy, transforming traditional service industries with modern new technologies, new business formats, and new service methods, creating demand, guiding consumption, and providing society with high value-added, high-level, high-quality, knowledge-based production and life services."

Modern service industries are commonly classified as follows: (1) Basic services (such as communication services and information services); (2) Production and market services (such as finance, logistics, wholesale, e-commerce, agricultural support services, as well as intermediary and consulting professional services); (3) Personal consumption and life services (such as education, healthcare, daily life, accommodation, catering, laundry, cultural entertainment, tourism, real estate, retail, etc.); (4) Public services (such as government public management services, basic education, public health, medical care, and public welfare information services).

It can be seen that these modern service industries all have characteristics of the times, namely: new service fields — adapting to the development needs of modern cities and modern industries, breaking through the realm of consumer service industries, forming new fields of production service industries, intellectual (knowledge) service industries, and public service industries; new service models — modern service industries generate new service formats through service function upgrades and service model innovations; and features such as high cultural taste, high technological content, high value-added services, high emotional experience, and high spiritual enjoyment.

After clarifying what modern service industry is, we should develop our current traditional, consumer-oriented, social life service laundry and dyeing industry into a modern service industry. So how to develop it? I think according to the definition of modern service industry, the main point is to develop the laundry and dyeing industry based on new technologies, new business formats, and new service methods. Specifically, there are at least the following aspects we need to work on.

First, in first-, second-, and third-tier cities, focus on developing centralized washing, so that the laundry and dyeing industry can first implement modern industrialized production in China.

Recently, China's famous economist Professor Li Yining said that the current urbanization rate in China is 45%, expected to reach 50% by 2015 and 75% by 2020. With the increase in urbanization rate, China's first-, second-, and third-tier cities will further expand along with the increase of small and medium-sized towns. The laundry and dyeing industry will also develop rapidly based on the growth of many small and medium-sized towns and first-, second-, and third-tier cities. At this time, whether to develop small-scale workshop-style front shop and back factory production or to develop industrialized large-scale production is a matter that the laundry and dyeing industry associations in first-, second-, and third-tier cities need to plan and decide.

Currently, China has nearly 250,000 laundry and dyeing shops of various sizes, employing more than 1.25 million people, with an annual laundry capacity of over 2 billion pieces (items) and annual revenue exceeding 50 billion RMB, growing at a rate of over 20% annually. Since the vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of shops still operate as small workshop-style production, these small-scale enterprises have small scale, weak technical strength, high production costs, high energy consumption, serious environmental pollution, and low service quality, which cannot meet the needs of China's new technology and knowledge economy development, nor the needs of large and medium-sized cities.

Modern industrialized large-scale production refers to production using modern production technology and equipment, with mechanized, electrified, automated, informatized, and high-speed production processes. Currently, China's laundry equipment such as dry cleaning machines and washing machines have a high degree of integration of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic systems, which generally can meet the needs of industrialized large-scale production. However, the key lies in how to reasonably configure according to advanced washing process flows. The first step to achieve laundry industrialization in first-, second-, and third-tier cities is to realize decentralized collection and centralized washing. The second step, essential for true modern industrialized washing, is to build large-scale washing factories or washing industry parks in the suburbs of these cities to realize modernization of the laundry industry. This is similar to the large and medium-sized cities in China such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Hangzhou, which have established large-scale industrialized washing factories or washing industry parks.

Achieving industrialized washing production first in first-, second-, and third-tier cities not only transforms and upgrades the traditional laundry industry, improves efficiency, and truly achieves energy saving and emission reduction, but also enables the city to centrally collect and treat harmful substances polluting the environment from laundry, which is conducive to urban environmental quietness and building livable cities.

Second, laundry enterprises that have achieved industrialized production should further realize informatization and networking, achieving integration of two networks and two informatizations.

The informatization mentioned here means, first, promoting informatization through industrialized laundry enterprises to achieve integration of industrialization and informatization; second, enterprises should operate under the integration technology of the Internet and the Internet of Things. Currently, apart from using POS machines (point of sale terminals) for cash registers, computers for customer relationship management and financial report management, very few laundry enterprises in China use a relatively complete ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system for informatized management. Moreover, most laundry enterprises still perform processes such as decentralized collection, washing sorting, numbering, stain removal, washing, ironing, finishing, packaging, and delivery manually. Therefore, industrialized laundry enterprises should build an artificial digital neural network information management system and use RFID (electronic tags)-based Internet of Things technology to control and manage the entire washing process informatization.

The enterprise digital neural network system is an application of artificial neural network systems in enterprise management. Artificial neural networks, often abbreviated as neural network systems, simulate part of the human brain's image thinking ability using networks composed of neurons modeled after the human brain. Neural network systems developed rapidly in the mid-1980s, and now the application of artificial neural network theory has penetrated multiple fields, such as enterprise management, computer vision, pattern recognition, intelligent control, simulation design, nonlinear optimization, adaptive information processing, robotics, and more.

The enterprise digital neural network management system is developed by combining modern information technology, modern management technology, and bionic technology. It is internationally recognized as the latest fifth-generation management system (focused on knowledge management). It is intelligent knowledge-based and also informatized.

In the 21st century, every laundry and dyeing enterprise must face competition from domestic and international peers. To win the competition, it is necessary to rely on information technology to respond quickly to market and economic information. This is the main means for enterprises to survive and develop. The enterprise digital neural network management system consists of digital processes that enable enterprises to utilize the intelligent prediction function of neural networks, perceive their environment in a timely manner, respond quickly, challenge competitors, understand customer needs, and organize timely responses. The system provides a complete information flow, allowing the right information to reach the right place at the right time. The management systems used by enterprises in the past, from the initial MRP to MRPⅡ, ERP, SCM, and CRM, despite many brands, have not been well applied in enterprises. The main reason is that these systems emphasize functions too much, have poor business process reengineering capabilities, do not conform to enterprise habitual management, and lack flexibility, intelligence, optimized decision-making, and predictability. The enterprise digital neural network management system precisely fills these gaps, so it will definitely be widely applied in laundry and dyeing enterprises.

The reason why our laundry and dyeing enterprises have mainly used manual operations throughout the washing process in the past is mainly due to the lack of good coding media and intelligent sensor technology during washing. However, the recently developed Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) can manage the entire washing process from the collection coding to delivery along with the laundry. In recent years, as RFID applications have grown, costs have continuously decreased, with the lowest market price dropping to about 1 cent, providing a reliable guarantee for our enterprises to widely use RFID technology. Especially last year, the advocated Internet of Things technology has made RFID its core.

The so-called Internet of Things technology is a new technology based on the Internet, connecting all things in the world organically. Just as interpersonal communication relies on the Internet, things are also connected by networks. The Internet of Things is the third wave of the global information industry after computers, the Internet, and mobile communication networks. Its emergence has transformed the entire social model from human-centered to multi-centered, i.e., thing-to-thing, human-to-thing, and thing-to-human models. Many IT experts, economists, entrepreneurs, and government officials believe that the innovative integration of the "Internet of Things" and the "Internet" will become the technological driving force for the next round of global economic development.

After the inauguration of the new US President Obama last year, at a roundtable meeting with business leaders, he proposed the concept of a "Smart Earth," which includes the US forming a smart infrastructure "Internet of Things." This is regarded by Americans as a key strategy to revitalize the economy and establish a competitive advantage, and the Obama administration has given it positive affirmation.

China is also paying great attention to and valuing research on the Internet of Things. In August last year, Premier Wen Jiabao proposed at the Wuxi Micro-Nano Sensor Network Engineering Technology R&D Center to "quickly establish China's sensor information center, or called the 'Perception China' center." In fact, there are already successful applications of networking between things today, such as transport vehicles equipped with GPS satellite positioning systems and containers equipped with RFID chips, which can freely pass through toll stations without stopping and automatically complete loading and unloading at unmanned docks. This "dialogue" relationship between different objects will rapidly expand. By 2011, the number of "smart objects" embedded with chips, sensors, and wireless radio frequency may exceed 1 trillion, far surpassing the global population of 6.5 billion. While humans are online, these objects can also perceive and exchange information through the Internet of Things.

In the 1970s, the emergence of product barcodes triggered the first commercial revolution. However, with the development of economic globalization, barcodes can no longer meet the requirements for convenient, fast, and accurate identification, tracking, and management of individual items, leading to the development of RFID technology. Now, based on RFID technology, the Electronic Product Code (EPC) method and standard developed by the US AUTO-ID Center have been globally recognized. Therefore, the Internet of Things composed of RFID, EPC coding, and data communication, integrated through the Internet and global computers, forms a complete EPC system technology, enabling global information sharing and collaborative work. It is believed that such technology will definitely be successfully applied to information management and laundry informatization management in laundry and dyeing enterprises in the future.

3. In the development of the modern laundry and dyeing industry, new service methods must be used to change old service methods, and the best new service method is to promote customized laundry services.

After entering the 21st century, with the improvement of people's living standards, there has been a corresponding higher demand for the washing of their clothing. Requirements include faster and more flexible delivery responses, higher washing quality, lower costs and energy consumption, more personalized and exclusive washing, better pollution-free and health-beneficial green washing, and so on. These demands have driven traditional laundry services to develop towards personalized customized laundry services.

Customized laundry service refers to modern washing industrial production services that can meet customers' unique and various personalized washing requirements. In fact, the membership systems, VIP systems, rental or contracted washing models for enterprises, institutions, and organizations currently used by various laundry and dyeing enterprises are already customized laundry services. However, the difference is that they have not industrialized production according to the different requirements of each customer, resulting in particularly low efficiency. For example, some customers require their clothes to be washed separately to prevent cross-infection, while others require neutral washing for garments, and some customers require washing without perchloroethylene, etc.
As an industrialized enterprise, it is necessary to use informatization methods to classify various different requirements into washing suitable for large-scale industrial production to improve production efficiency. Of course, this service does not exclude the use of small and small-capacity washing equipment to complete customized laundry services.

4. In the new service format, green washing should be created for customers' healthy lives, providing customers with high emotional experience and high spiritual enjoyment.

Since our Laundry Professional Committee issued the call for "scientific washing, green washing" at the 2004 industry work conference in Qingdao, some laundry and dyeing enterprises have taken obtaining ISO14001 environmental management system and ISO14024 environmental label product certification as their goal for the new century. To achieve this goal, every laundry and dyeing enterprise should start with green design and green washing.

Green design technology refers to green products after washing. Green products can be described as follows: green products are those that, throughout their entire life cycle, meet specific environmental protection requirements, cause no or minimal harm to the ecological environment, cause no or minimal harm to human survival, have the highest resource utilization rate, and the lowest energy consumption. Green design technology refers to design techniques that can reduce pollution, lower consumption, control pollution, or improve the ecological environment. Green design of products generally includes two aspects: first, clean washing production, reducing discharge and pollution waste in every washing process; second, resource saving, both saving raw and auxiliary materials and ensuring that these materials do not entirely become waste after use but are easy to recycle and reuse. Green Design (GD) is also known as Ecological Design (ED), Design for Environment (DFE), Life Cycle Design (LCD), etc. From the concept of green design, it is clear that green design targets the green level of washing products as the design goal, fully considering the environmental impacts of raw material acquisition, washing production and processing, transportation and sales, use, and recycling. Therefore, green designers must have considerable green knowledge to be the main force in green design. For example, in the design of green clothing washing, it is necessary to identify the fabrics used, select detergents and auxiliaries that meet low energy consumption, low cost, low pollution, and easy recycling during washing production, and ensure that the washed clothing contains no toxic components, does not produce harmful substances during use, does not pollute the environment, and is easy to degrade or recycle after being discarded. Thus, our green designers must not only be skilled in washing process design but also understand green design.

The main research contents of green washing design and production include the following six aspects:

(1) Selection and management of raw and auxiliary materials for green clothing washing;
(2) The feasibility of recycling green washing raw and auxiliary materials, the value of recycling, recycling methods, recycling processability, etc., ultimately achieving the lowest resource and energy consumption and minimal environmental pollution;
(3) Processing and production of green clothing washing;
(4) Packaging design after green clothing washing. Washed green clothing must be green packaged to have an overall green washing image and market competitiveness. Green packaging design generally includes optimizing packaging plans and structures, selecting packaging materials that are easy to handle, biodegradable, recyclable, reusable, or recyclable;
(5) Cost analysis of green washed clothing;
(6) Establishing a database and knowledge base for green washed clothing, fully utilizing modern information technology to build a comprehensive database and knowledge base. This should include all data and knowledge related to washed clothing and the environment, economy, technology, and countermeasures, such as the composition of green washing raw and auxiliary materials, environmental impact values of various detergents, natural or artificial degradation cycles of various chemicals and auxiliaries, costs, quantities of by-products generated during manufacturing, sales, and use, and their environmental impact values.

With the improvement of modern people's quality of life, everyone understands the importance of protecting life and health. Green is the only choice for clothing care and washing. Wearing clothes washed greenly is the best protection for human health, bringing the highest spiritual enjoyment and emotional experience.

5. Industrialized washing and dyeing enterprises should implement 6σ (pronounced "six sigma") system management for washing quality.

Since the start of the "National Ninth Five-Year Plan," China's washing and dyeing enterprises have begun ISO9000 quality system certification. Now, almost 100% of large-scale industrial production enterprises in China have been certified. However, certification is just certification; quality is still quality. Everyone knows quality is the life of an enterprise, but sometimes you still hear "washing quality is not good." Why are there still quality problems? The key is that enterprises have not made strong efforts and quality goals are unclear. Poor quality mainly manifests as color fading and color transfer during washing, large shrinkage after washing, washing according to incorrect washing labels, poor ironing quality, incomplete stain removal, failure to pass ecological standards for green washed clothing, and high rewash rates for factory-washed clothing in some enterprises.

ISO9000 quality system certification only proves that your enterprise has the conditions to ensure product quality; it does not tell you the goal of good product quality nor how to achieve it. In April last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening Industrial Product Quality Work," clearly proposing to strengthen the promotion of new quality assurance systems. The currently popular 6σ quality management system quantitatively tells enterprises how to grasp qualified product quality goals.

σ, from a mathematical perspective, is the standard deviation defined for fluctuations; σ squared is the commonly known mean square deviation. The so-called 6SIGMA management is a systematic science that achieves a quality level with defects approaching 3.4 per million by reducing fluctuations and continuous innovation, to achieve maximum customer satisfaction and maximum profit. In other words, quality management must reach 6σ, meaning that out of one million washed garments, only 3.4 can be defective, i.e., a 6σ yield rate of 99.9997%, which is higher than pure gold. Currently, no enterprise in the world has achieved this; even a great company like Motorola can only reach 4~5σ, meaning its product yield rate is between 99.38% and 99.977%; general enterprises can only reach 3σ, with a product yield rate of 93.32%.

The 6σ quality system can quantitatively help enterprises find a yield rate above 4σ through the DMAIC quality management trial method. Therefore, I personally believe that our washing and dyeing enterprises need to strive to adopt the 6σ quality management system as the goal for product quality while advancing industrialization and informatization.