Blog Entry 2. Internship at VIC Textiltvätt AB in Kållered!

Hi everyone,

Following from last weeks’ update, I will in this blog entry tell you about the ‘opportunity’ I mentioned last week.
VIC has 3 independent hand-in shops (Mölndal, Hisingen and Kungsbacka) excluded from the shop in the factory in Kållered.
VIC’s ambition is to be a modern dry-cleaning business and one step towards becoming that is to abandon loose hand-written paper work as much as possible. Getting rid of unnecessary hand-written paper work is not only a mere proof of modern thinking, it is also environmental.
After the system was implemented in the factory and I had been trained to master it, I was asked to teach out the new system to the employees in the independent hand-in shops.
This process will continue during the fall so up to this point I have at the moment only provided training in the system for one of the shops, the one at Hisingen.
The IT guy and I went out to the shop and had everything installed and in place so I could start teach our employee.

The IT guy finishing the set-up of the new system at the shop in Hisingen.

The new system, computer and a tag printer.

The hand-in shop at Hisingen.

The new system consists of a laptop, so when customers comes in and hand in their laundry, the employee will in the new system fill in the customer’s name, phone number and what the customer have handed in as well as the delivery date. Once this is done, the employee prints a receipt for both the customer and him/herself, then tags/labels with a five unique digit number are printed which are used to mark the laundry so when the laundry is delivered back from the factory, it can be matched with the receipt that the customer has and identified with the receipt that the employee printed when the customer handed the laundry in.

I think the system is great! One of the major advantages with digitalizing the business it is that if you lose the printed receipt, you can still print out a new one, when the clothes arrives from the factory, you can just check the marking and then print out a new receipt.
This was not as easy with hand written receipts.

The new system also allows the employee to make invoices which are then sent to the factory where the owner of the company (my stepdad) takes care of the rest.

When I am there, I like to arrange the customers’ laundry in color scales and the like, if possible 😊

Besides from teaching out the new system, I have also worked with some administrative tasks in the factory.
VIC receives ‘skador’ (‘Damages’) on a daily basis which are laundry/dry-cleaning items from insurance companies. If there’s been a fire in a house, the insurance company can take all the clothes, and send them to VIC where we have a look at what can be dry-cleaned and washed.
The sizes of these ‘skador* varies, sometimes it can be one refuse sack and sometimes 40.
Each ‘skada’ receives a unique number when they have arrived to VIC and once it has been recorded, washed and packed, we place them in the large store room.
VIC wants to keep track of what is finished, when it is finished and where it is standing n the store room to just mention a few information of interest.
That’s where I come in, I have sometimes helped out creating this information in excel.
 

So overall, teaching other employees a new system requires more time than we might think. Also, the preparational stages can take time as well.
I’m happy though that I was given the chance to help out with this task and I’m looking forward to teach out our other employees’ at the other shops the new system.

Next week I will let you know what I have been learning from this internship and what I’ve been up to since this post.

/ Emma