I would like to start off by saying thank you for giving me the opportunity for this travelling scholarship. I found the trip to Copenhagen extremely useful and it gave me a great insight to how other laundries work as I’ve never been to see any other laundry other than Tibard. It also gave me great knowledge of the way Berensden works. I would like to say that the trip has helped me to understand all different kinds of machinery that we have.

While we were there we visited three different plants, the first one called Hillerod was a plant that mainly did bed linen and they used the RFID system which I thought was very useful as they could keep track on where each item was and whether or not the customers had ordered too much stock or not enough.

The second one Roskilde was mainly chefs/work wear and they were currently installing the RFID system so it was the most hectic one of the three. This plant also supplied tablecloths and blankets for airplanes and boats which I thought was a great idea as according to the manager and the graphs we were shown that area of customers benefited their business.

The third one Olsted was a healthcare plant and they were most advanced with the RFID system. At this plant the customers themselves were able to log onto the system which tracks where their stock was and how long it was on their site before returning to the plant. Olsted had a system that worked for them which meant after a certain amount of days if the stock they were delivered wasn’t returned to the plant the customer was charged a replacement price.

The people I met at the laundries were very welcoming and they answered any questions we had and also treated us all to some of their traditional food which was lovely.

Each of the three laundries we visited used a working system called LEAN. This meant that every day the managers have a class and train their employees. They also have regular meetings within the shop floor where the plant manager, supervisors and team leaders inform each employee of their targets, these were also written on a whiteboard every day so the staff could see it whenever they needed to. This meant that the managers then could get to know their employees on a bit of a more personal level which I though was also a great idea. Each laundry made it compulsory that their employees were taught Danish for an hour every day; this was to help the communication within the plants as there were many different ethnicities.

As for the people I met on the trip Donna, Mildred and John were lovely and we all really enjoyed getting to know each other over meals and walks around the city. It was also really nice to learn about what they do within their job roles. I think it would be great to be able to visit their laundries one day and see what their days consist of.

Thank you.

Aimee McCormick