"CPO futures hits all-time high, surpasses RM4,400 level." - The Edge News May 2021
This may come as a foreign news to everyday consumers and small business owners, but news like this have a major impact to our every day lives. A significant amount of the consumer products used by us on a day to day basis derives from Crude Oil and Palm Oil. For example, detergent cleaning chemicals, plastic, agrochemicals, paint solvent. As the estimated prices of this commodity rises, it will have a knock on impact to our daily consumable prices.
To some seasoned dobi owners, they have experienced this before in the past, and inevitably will have to increase their service fee to cover cost. However, as the competition is getting tougher with new dobi owners and self service operators coming in, they cannot afford to increase their prices as the competition will outmatch them.
To stay ahead of the game, these are our top 5 tips that we can share to dobi owners as chemical manufacturers.
1) Use better products
For powder detergent customers, we would always recommend to use our K100 detergent as it includes high content of advance performance surfactants, enzymes, colour safe oxy bleach, and optical brightener. The reason is because this multi function blend detergent performs well in cold water and behaves similarly as hot water wash. You save time with just a single wash rather than multiple washes to remove tough stains, and also save energy to heat up water.
You can then focus more time on gathering business sales rather than wasting time and money on multiple washes and high electric bills.
2) Per Wash economics
We always recommend our customers to use our Liquid M2 concentrated detergent rather than our Liquid CF economic detergent. It is because you will usually gain more in the grand scheme of things as usually the dosage guide is very important.
For example, let's say a concentrated detergent (1kg laundry to 8ml detergent) costs about RM0.36/100ml and an economic detergent (1kg laundry to 15ml detergent) cost about RM0.24/100ml.
100ml of Concentrated detergent will let you wash 12.5kg, whereas economic detergent will let you 6.67kg only, roughly about half the load of the concentrated detergent. However, if you want to wash 12.6kg of laundry with economic detergent, you will end up spending RM0.10 more than the concentrated detergent. When you buy a 25L drum, this actually equates to about RM25 worth of savings.
So start setting up some stringent SOP for your staff and use concentrated detergent to manage your cost in the long run.
3) Taking care of your machines
Low suds detergent as bubble foams damages your machine drainage pipes overtime. Our detergent range are typically low suds as we understand the overtime cost of repairing machines and also downtime impacting your business sales.
4) Building long term loyal customers
We like to take care and go the extra mile for our lifelong customers who have been with us since the beginning of our company, as they will always come back for our services, trust and business integrity for stability. This is the same for dobi operators as well.
That's why it is always good to get confirmation from your chemical suppliers for Quality Assurance and Checks in place. Look for accreditation such as Halal and ISO certification, and if absence of those certification, a report for every production batch for full transparency.
5) Minimising overhead with technology
Invest in automation. This will save cost for the long run, even if the return of investment takes a while.
Look into automated dispenser technology, advance drum rotation technology.
