WHERE LINEN GOES MISSING
Where does linen actually go missing?
Linen leaves circulation in three distinct ways, and they have to be separated before any of them can be fixed. IntelTagRFID is a UHF-RFID textile tracking and laundry reconciliation platform that distinguishes stock lost on the transit leg between site and laundry, stock carried out through a monitored door, and stock that is not lost at all but sitting somewhere off-cycle. Each cause has a different remedy, so reporting them as one monthly figure guarantees that the wrong one gets addressed.
Lost on the transit leg
The leg between a site and its laundry is where custody changes hands, and it is the only point where two independent records exist for the same items. Matching dispatch scans against receive scans per delivery note isolates transit loss from everything else, and attributes it to a collection and a day. Industry reporting puts annual hotel linen loss at 10–20%, rising to 20–30% where tracking is poor (xenia.team).
Carried out through a door
Doorway readers record every tagged item that passes an exit point. Reporting breaks this down per door, per hour and per item type, with age buckets and an exit timeline, and for garments it attributes the item to the wearer it was still assigned to. An item whose last recorded scan was an exit point has left the building, which is a materially different finding from an item that is merely unaccounted for. Exit Monitor hardware is sized at ten exits per controller.
Not lost — just not where you think
Every item is bucketed by days since its last scan, in bands running from seven days through to never seen, split by clean and dirty status and broken down by description and location. This is where par stock sitting in rooms, linen parked in off-cycle storage and tags that failed at commissioning separate out from genuine loss. Items past ninety days, and those never seen since tagging, form the follow-up list.
Why the three must never be one number
Transit loss is a reconciliation and process problem between two parties. Door loss is a security and access problem. Stale stock is an inventory visibility problem. A single shrinkage figure averages all three into something that cannot be actioned, and usually directs effort at whichever cause is most visible rather than the largest.
Common questions
By where the last scan happened. An item whose final read was at a monitored exit left through that door, at a recorded time. An item with no recent read anywhere is stale stock until proven otherwise, and is reported separately.
For garments, the item is attributed to the wearer it was still assigned to at the time. For linen there is no wearer, so the finding is the door, the hour and the item type rather than a person.
That is a reporting threshold, not a verdict. Items are grouped into bands by days since last scan — through to a never-seen bucket — with items past ninety days and never-seen items forming the follow-up list.
An item that was tagged and entered into the system but has never been scanned at any read point since. It usually indicates stock that never entered circulation, or a tag that failed at commissioning.
Yes. Stock aging is broken down by description, location and property, so the pattern can be compared across sites rather than inferred from a group total.
Exit Monitor stations are specified at ten exits per controller. Door count is one of the inputs to a station-based quotation.
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