<< Case Studies

Hot Off The Press are a young Mobile Laundrette which offers fast and reliable ironing and washing with discounted rates when the two services are combined.

A friendly team arrives at your home or workplace at a time that’s convenient for you. They currently cover Burnham, Slough, Windsor, Eton, Chippenham, Taplow, Maidenhead, Cookham, Marlow, Beaconsfield, Langley, Farnham Royal, Wexham and Stoke Poges and are expanding into other areas with the launch of new franchises across the UK.

In order to grow, Thomas, the Founder and Director, realised they needed to have a better grip on their data and having information available to all their operatives in a way that was simple and intuitive.

“Previously, we had to copy information from one application to another. We’d duplicate content from our online calendar to the Notes app that we all had access to. We’d then message each of our operatives via WhatsApp,” says Eleni, Manager of Hot Off The Press.

“We were continually scrolling within  Notes and WhatsApp and trying to find the relevant information between the two apps.  Jobs could easily be missed and, in the worst case, lost altogether if the Notes app went down or someone deleted something by mistake.”

Why did Hot Off The Press choose Okappy?

Tom looked at multiple software but couldn’t find anything that fit his needs, nor could be tailored to their business requirements. His drivers needed to be able to log into a dashboard to add new jobs and view ongoing ones. They needed different job types such as Ironing, Washing, Washing & Ironing, Dry Cleaning, Repairs & Alterations as well as others.

They required a reference field and weight field wishing each job, along with the due date, whom the job is assigned to and any notes for that job. They needed to see the status of each job and whether the job had been paid (and how i.e., cash, card, online, PayPal or direct debit). However, they didn’t want to have to enter customer information as they have a separate system for that nor any location-tracking feature.

“I was really impressed by how flexible Okappy is” says Tom, Director of Hot Off The Press.

“Our business is different to most which is why we love how Okappy can be configured and adapted to our needs.”

Ultimately, using Okappy meant that Tom and his team had real-time visibility over what was going on with the business. There was no more lost or missing information nor searching through multiple systems to find relevant information to a particular job.

How are Hot Off The Press using Okappy to streamline their business and reduce costs?

“Our drivers collect the clothes from the customer and add the job onto the Okappy system via the Okappy Monitor iOS App. 

Back in the factory, they can see all the outstanding jobs in chronological order on a 50” screen.  

All ironers working on our premises can view the jobs and then select one to start work on.

They mark the job as ‘Onsite’ when they start ironing, using a wall-mounted iPad.

Once finished, they mark the job as ‘Complete’.

At this stage, we know it’s ready to be delivered back to the customer. We also have ironers working from home. They can also access the list of jobs on their mobile and update it in the same way. The admin team monitor the progress of all the jobs on a  wall-mounted screen above our desks which is set to display today’s jobs.

At a glance, we can monitor the status of all our jobs”, says Eleni, “as well as immediately see if there are any problems so we can promptly fix them.”

Currently, Hot Off The Press doesn’t use the invoicing functionality of Okappy as some of their jobs are too complex to rely on importing to Kashflow. They manually create an invoice on Kashflow and then archive the job once it has been entered. At the end of the month, they import specific employees’ jobs into Kashflow in order to calculate the wages (which is based on the weight of clothes ironed).

In addition, Hot Off The Press has now set up its first franchise in Essex. Using Okappy they can send jobs to the franchise and see the status whilst keeping the separation between the two businesses. Sometimes when they are busy, they might use our ironers. With Okappy, they just add and send the jobs to us. Our ironers will pick up the jobs then complete. Our franchisee can finally see the progress of each job without the need to make regular phone calls for updates.

How has this benefited Hot Off The Press?

By having a big screen on site, everyone is able to see what everyone else is doing. “It’s simple and easy,” says Tom. “The ironers just click on the job, update the progress or make a note and attach a picture if needed, then click ‘Complete job’ and that’s it. As the ironers are paid by weight, we can run a report for each ironer, look at their jobs and the weight of clothes they’ve ironed and quickly work out how much to pay them. It used to take days to pull everything together, now it only takes 30 seconds for each ironer. It’s amazing!”

Tom can now spend more time thinking about more important things such as how he can grow the franchise and take on more business.  They’re now even looking expanding into other sections such as cleaning.