Voted best amusement park in the world, the Grand parc du Puy du Fou, located in Vendée, now uses Brooclean software to manage the cleaning of the costumes.
Brooclean for costume management
Interview with Pascal Berardozzi
Inforum project manager and co-owner
What were the main needs expressed by the Puy du Fou for the management of the resort's costumes cleaning?
[Pascal Berardozzi] The Puy du Fou wanted to implement traceability for the clothing and accessories of all the staff working there. It goes from the gardener to the actor including the horse. Several thousand individuals with several tens of thousands of pieces of all kinds. All spread over around thirty shows and a 55 hectare site.
A laundry is directly integrated in the resort, as well as a costume-making workshop and several stock areas. The organization is very specific and requires advanced management of items with multiple descriptions and attributes that differ according to use. Work clothes and stage costumes are not managed the same way, but they still needed to be administered from a single centralized system. Assistance was also requested for all items’ crossing points. From the creation of basic stocks, to the sorting at the entrance to the laundry, through the automated recomposition of the cleaned packages. It was also necessary to interact with data from human resources in order not to have to re-enter contracts and identification badges. But also provide an Intranet access from the multiple information touch screens throughout the site. This had to be done in a given time, and it was also necessary to recover the data already in place with the solution previously used which did not meet the needs on many criteria.
How does the Brooclean solution meet these needs?
[Pascal Berardozzi] Inforum has been able to use its expertise in the field of textile care for more than 20 years and adapt its Brooclean production management tool to the specifics of the market.
In Brooclean, the pre-existing functional coverage makes it possible to manage production flows, from order to customer invoice with inventory management, delivery notes, customer invoices and classic CRM features.
Our development department, in collaboration with the technical teams from Puy du Fou in charge of the file, designed precise specifications and planning which allowed the operational implementation of a test phase within the allotted time.
The tool entered the production phase ahead of the requested timing and even went beyond the customer's initial expectations.
It has therefore been supporting employees since the resort reopened on June 10, 2021.
What is the interaction with the Thermotex material?
[Pascal Berardozzi] One of the project constraints was the need to carry out traceability from RFID chips and to have assistance equipment for operators for sorting of dirty laundry at the entrance and recomposition of clean laundry at the exit. Thermotex is a privileged partner of Inforum and has in its product range all the components necessary for these operations:
- UHF radio frequency chips dedicated to textiles
- Encoding tables allowing the recording and reading of identifiers
- The IN-Sortexx indicator light system with its illuminated rack to indicate the washing bins according to the qualities of the textiles
- The OUT-Sortexx indicator light system with its illuminated compartments to allow error-free and time-saving recomposition of packages and shipments.
Not to mention specialized printers with consumables and heat-sealing presses to attach identifiers and add extra visual information necessary for the smooth running of business processes.
The Inforum and Thermotex teams have worked in close collaboration for over 2 years to design a complete solution with Brooclean software, perfectly integrating the hardware of the European leader, allowing customers to benefit from the best of both companies.
Puy du Fou equipment
Project manager - Laundry traceability
Why did you choose the Thermotex / Brooclean solution?
[Sonia Naullet] The Puy du Fou has chosen to trust the Thermotex / Brooclean solution for the traceability of its laundry because it offers the possibility to develop and customize the software, which perfectly meets the expected needs.
Thanks to its own integrated laundry, the Puy du Fou is independent in the maintenance of its costumes and outfits they entrust to the employees for the season as well as catering laundry.
In addition, with its seventy delivery points on the site, the Puy du Fou wanted to integrate a traceability solution in order to improve the management of its items within the laundry.
Sorting in the dirty area by type of washing program allows us to optimize our machines, also the sorting solution in the clean area allows us to recompose the allocations by employee and delivery point, which represents considerable time saving and limits errors when dispensing laundry.
This Thermotex / Brooclean solution also offers the possibility of making a detailed follow-up of the number of washes per outfit and costume, thus allowing us to study the resistance of our materials, as well as to monitor more precisely the lifespan of our costumes, our outfits and our PPE.
Managing the distribution of employee endowments is simplified for us because this software allows us to define endowments taking into account job assignments and contract periods.
In addition, this software offers us the possibility of improving the management of our stocks. With a flow of around 60,000 outfits and costumes combined, we needed to know exactly the movements between the different delivery points while improving the management of our scrapped items.
Faced with these different expectations, Thermotex / Brooclean was able to offer us the appropriate solution.
How did the implementation phase go?
[Sonia Naullet] Thanks to very good support from Pascal Berardozzi, the software was operational fairly quickly.
This implementation began with a first test phase with two technical teams representing around one hundred employees.
This phase allowed us to adapt the software as the implementation progressed.
What are the strengths of the solution?
[Sonia Naullet] This solution offers intuitive software with an easy-to-access production interface due to its ease of use at the marking, distribution and production station.
This software is adaptable and compatible with existing software at Puy du Fou.
In addition, strength of proposal, listening and responsiveness would be the three strengths best representing our collaboration.
How did the staff integrate the new solution?
[Sonia Naullet] The laundry staff quickly appreciated the ease of use of the equipment allowing more fluid organization within the service: the items are sorted by washing category in the laundry reception area called the “dirty area”, then the lots are recomposed by delivery point and by employee in the “clean area”
Regarding the outfit distribution service, the handling is being done gradually, the flow management will be more important the week before the opening of Puy du Fou.
The ease of use of the tool allowed a quick and comfortable integration for all the employees managing the distribution of endowments as well as laundry maintenance.
Visit the Puy du Fou website
Material provided by Thermotex
Interview with Guillaume Durst
Hard / Software Project Manager at Thermotex
How did the installation go?
[Guillaume Durst] The hardware installation took place at the Puy du Fou site in cooperation with the resort’s IT team during a closure phase. It was during this on-site action that the software training also took place. The laundry team was integrated into this phase and it was quick to get started with the tool.
What were the most important points in the success of this project?
[Guillaume Durst] The outstanding elements of this project were the quality of the communication between all the actors of the project. Since the Puy du Fou laundry is not a "classic" laundry, the needs expressed were far from being classic.
Having particularly well written specifications, and a dedicated and very involved project manager at Puy du Fou in the person of Sonia Naullet was extremely valuable.
Contacts were very frequent. The various test phases have led to improvements so that the switch to production mode goes smoothly.
The ThermoTex / Inforum partnership has been established for several years for this type of action, because the connectivity of ThermoTex equipment to Inforum software solutions is native. And having a competent and committed team "on the customer side" will undoubtedly have contributed to the overall success of the project.
Project carried out in partnership with Thermotex
Inforum equips the Puy du Fou