An attempt to improve the laundry experience by morphing laundromats into singles spots failed, but ramping up the technology is securing Mac-Gray Corp. a spot as a laundry leader.
Announcing its new web monitoring laundry system, called LaundryView, Mac-Gray promises users can come clean while observing washers and dryers from desktops.
Students returning to Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Franklin Olin College of Engineering from winter break will learn that their laundry facilities are connected to their dorm rooms. Before schlepping to laundry rooms with baskets, detergents and pockets full of change, the students will be able to log onto a site created specifically for monitoring their laundry rooms and learn whassup.
Any browser works, so the program is accessible from desktops, palm units or smart cell phones. Students go to the site, select from the list of laundry facilities and call up a graphic showing all the washers and dryers. They learn which are available and if any are broken.
They also discover the number of minutes left on all of the machines in operation, in most cases on a single page. Laundry rooms with more than 20 machines require scrolling for a complete laundry room snapshot. And clicking onto a box representing a specific machine enables students to be notified by e-mail when a cycle is complete.
“If you’ve got laundry in, you want to get down there before it’s tossed on the floor,” says Bob Tuttle, Mac-Gray’s vice president of field technology. “We have 380 schools under contract, and we think this will be of interest to a lot of them.”
Especially since it doesn’t cost the schools much to offer smart laundry rooms. Academic institutions that contract with Mac-Gray provide the utilities and lease the space. Mac-Gray brings in and services the coin-operated Maytag machines and the revenue is split.
And speaking of coin-op, it was Mac-Gray founder H. S. Gray who invented the coin-operated washing machine around 1930, leading to growth of the company that is now publicly traded. The company has had headquarters in Cambridge since the 1960s.
Web-monitored wash may also be of interest to the company’s other markets, in particular the military and multi-unit housing. Tuttle says the company has not approached its other academic customers or the military because the product is so new. As for multi-unit residences, he says it will first target high-end complexes because an Ethernet connection is paramount.
A box in the laundry room is connected to each washer and dryer on one end and the Internet on the other. Because most schools have Ethernet connections, it’s a natural early market.
“The main reason we’re doing it is to improve our service and be more competitive,” Tuttle said. “Schools go out to bid every few years, and we think it will provide a better service to the students.”
In addition, the program will help Mac-Gray track information about how and when the machines are used, as well as the functionality. With that information, Mac-Gray will be able to dispatch service technicians when they’re needed and know which facilities could use more or fewer machines.
Because it’s so new, Mac-Gray has no information about how the technology is being used, but Tuttle predicts it’ll be popular.
“This will allow them to see when the room is busy,” he says. “And it will also tell you how many people have asked to be told.”
Mac-Gray hopes to install the technology in all the schools it already services as well as offer it to schools they do not.
“Even schools using our competitors,” he says.
Mac-Gray’s competitors are Coinmach of Plainview, N.Y., Spin Cycle of Scottsdale, Ariz., and Web Service Co. of Redondo Beach, Calif.
The company went public at $11 a share and is now trading at $5.44, but the six-month trend is up.
Its web-based laundry monitoring is Mac-Gray’s latest laundry improvement of the past five months, following PrecisionWash, a system delivering predetermined doses of Tide laundry detergent into the wash, and LaundryLinx, an online automated service request system.
From Mass High Tech