IT Department: Protrack and the Garment Portal

Protrack

Protrack is Micronclean’s bespoke garment management system, built from the ground up by our in-house software development team, designed and tailored to the broad and specific needs of both the business and customers.

At its core, Protrack manages the whole garment life cycle, starting from the initial supplier order of garments and their eventual journey throughout Micronclean’s laundering, inspection and repair processes, delivery and collection to the customer until the end of an individual garments life necessitates removal from the system.  Tracking on this scale is enabled by barcode and RFID patches, allowing a fine-grained level of detail to be logged.

The resulting log data provides an invaluable wealth of information to be stored, processed and analysed, allowing automatic invoicing, certificates of irradiation to be issued for garments used in sterile environments, the location of a specific garment to its history of exact wash cycles, repairs and much more.  On a bigger scale, this data provides a view of Micronclean’s operational processes and efficiencies as large amounts of garments go through the system, allowing the identification of bottlenecks and potential improvements.

We are now beginning to extend Protrack in various ways to bring more of its powerful functionality and reporting directly to our customers, which has resulted in the introduction of the Micronclean Garment Portal.

Garment Portal

The Micronclean Garment Portal is a complete web application that gives our customers unprecedented visibility into their garment accounts and its reporting data on any device with an internet connection, allowing real-time access to a powerful array of information presented in a simple-to-use interface, with data filtering, sorting, summaries and custom reporting capabilities for customers wanting to dig deep into their data, whilst a high-level summary dashboard gives a clear at a glance overview of their contracts.

All the data available to each customer is exportable to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet allowing for further in-depth analysis:

• Full wash history for every garment
• Full repair history for every garment
• All garment invoices in PDF format
• Outstanding invoice values
• All on-order garments
• Irradiation certificates in PDF format (for sterilised garments only)
• History of garment deliveries
• Invoice value trends over time
• Garment usage statistics

Research Never Sleeps

Our development of system upgrades and features is very much driven by feedback from customers and our Continuous Improvement teams and processes, and one significant request was the ability to get information on a garment as it’s leaving or entering their site.

Micronclean is currently preparing and testing an on-site scanning solution, perfect for when a customer has a garment in hand and wants to know its repair history or any other data from the Protrack system. With the use of portable scanners and a simple web application, the garment is scanned, quickly pulling that garment's information from Protrack available for the customer to view.

It doesn’t stop there; we’re continually researching the feasibility of additional on-site solutions driven by Protrack that make our customers' lives and processes easier.

Author
Jason Humberstone
Head of Software