COVER STORY SPONSORED BY JENSEN That light bulb moment
Lights out, systems on: the ‘Dark Factory’ is revolutionising laundry automation at night when, traditionally, operations shut down. Now, says Jensen, full automation of sorting and storage means laundries can run all night with no staff present
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ndustrial laundries today face growing challenges: a persistent shortage of qualified personnel, especially for night shifts, rising labor costs, and increasing pressure to improve throughput and operational efficiency. Manual handling on the soil side is physically demanding, time-consuming, and difficult to staff, causing inefficiencies and limiting production capacity. Jensen’s innovative Dark Factory solution transforms how laundries operate overnight by fully automating sorting and storage, allowing production to continue without any staff presence.
What is a Dark Factory? The concept of a Dark Factory represents a groundbreaking shift in laundry automation, with a fully automated laundry operation that can run throughout the night without any human intervention. This innovative approach allows laundries to keep production flowing continuously, without being
limited by labor availability or shift schedules. In practical terms, the Dark Factory operates by having an operator manually load unsorted soiled linen bags into a designated primary storage area whenever soiled linen returns from customers outside normal operating hours. This is common in rental laundries serving hotels in major city centers, where linen collection and deliveries often take place overnight. Once loaded, Jensen’s advanced automated system takes complete control, sorting and classifying the linen based on predetermined criteria. The system then stores the sorted bags precisely in front of the tunnel washer, staged and ready for production. When the morning shift begins, operators find all laundry already sorted and prepared, allowing them to start the washing process immediately. This eliminates delays typically caused by manual sorting and staging, effectively turning the soil side of the laundry into a fully autonomous, efficient ‘dark’ operation.
SUN DOWN: Lights out, systems on – automation running through the night
Addressing labour and efficiency challenges
The labour shortage in the laundry industry is a temporary issue that also reflects broader demographic trends and changing workforce expectations, requiring long- term, sustainable solutions. Night shifts are often the hardest fro staff because they require employees to work outside of regular hours, which many find undesirable. This staffing difficulty leads to increased reliance on overtime, higher wage demands, and in some cases, understaffed shifts that impact productivity and product quality. Moreover, manual sorting processes are slow, repetitive, and prone to human error, which further limits throughput and increases operational costs. Jensen’s Dark Factory solution directly confronts these challenges by automating the sorting and storage tasks that would otherwise require human operators during off-hours. By shifting these labour-intensive tasks to an automated system, laundries can continue running their soil-side operations throughout the night without interruption. This addresses staffing shortages and also creates a more efficient, reliable, and predictable workflow that makes better use of existing infrastructure and increases overall throughput.
How the Dark Factory solution works
DARK GENIUS: Proven precision: Inwatec soil sorting technology at the core of the Dark Factory
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The operational flow of the Dark Factory solution is straightforward and highly effective. In the evening, operators load unsorted soiled linen bags into a primary buffer or storage area. Once the loading is complete, the system seamlessly takes over. Utilising a sorting and classification process covered by a patent appliacation and integrated with Inwatec’s advanced
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