Singapore has set up its first onsite centralized dishwashing facility located in a mall west of the island.
It has the capacity to consolidate dishwashing for 70 to 100 food and beverage (F&B) outlets, thereby optimizing productivity and efficiency.
Occupying 7,000 square feet, the centralized dishwashing facility has seven automated dishwashing lines, including one to serve Halal eateries.
Currently, six F&B tenants at IMM and 13 F&B operators in surrounding malls, including Westgate, JCube and The Star Vista, are tapping on the centralized dishwashing services.
With this service, participating F&B outlets enjoy productivity and manpower savings of between 50% and 80% in work hours, and they may no longer have to hire any dishwashing staff.
Meanwhile, outlets with existing dishwashing staff can redeploy them to other higher-value roles.
At Lian Peng Bak Kut Teh at IMM, for example, staff can focus on providing customer service and food preparation. The restaurant also increased its seating capacity by 10%, using the space otherwise allocated for dishwashing.
The manual dishwashing process has also been transformed with the use of industrial-grade, automated equipment for large capacities of crockery at centralized dishwashing facilities.
F&B outlets enjoy economies of scale by sharing the use of these dishwashing machines.
Workers are up skilled too, as they move from doing repetitive and mundane dishwashing tasks to operating automated equipment and taking on quality control duties.
Until now, centralized dishwashing facilities in Singapore are typically located in areas away from the F&B outlets that they serve.
In March 2015, dishwashing services provider, GreatSolutions, in collaboration with CapitaLand Mall Asia and supported by SPRING Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority, National Environment Agency and the Employment and Employability Institute, set up the first onsite facility at IMM.
Compared to offsite dishwashing facilities, the IMM facility has enabled participating F&B outlets to halve their logistics costs and crockery breakage with the shorter transportation distances, while ensuring a more frequent supply of clean crockery.
GreatSolutions is able to seamlessly clock four collections and returns a day to IMM tenants and three daily trips to F&B customers in surrounding areas, an increase from the two daily trips made from its offsite dishwashing plant at Senoko to its F&B customers located island wide.
Moving forward, SPRING will continue to work closely with service providers and F&B and mall operators to set up more onsite centralized dishwashing models in malls, as well as build up the capabilities of service providers and support F&B outlets to adopt centralized dishwashing.
