Wrinkle-Free Reporting for Laundry Capital
Laundry Capital is a growing laundry service company with over 100 locations throughout the United States. Laundry Capital was looking to standardize data collection and improve reporting across the organization.
Prior to the involvement of Extrada Tech, their operations team manually collected hard copy operational documents and managed hundreds of Excel workbooks on a weekly basis. This process made it difficult to identify sources of success, compare data over different periods, and ensure reports were accurate.
The Project At A Glance:
Challenges
Laundry Capital is a rapidly growing laundromat company looking to standardize, validate, and increase ownership in data captured while recording their day-to-day processes.
Solutions
Extrada Tech developed and deployed a web application with custom forms to record their business processes. The forms are intuitive, provide feedback real time, and change dynamically depending on user access. The data validation prevents misuse of company resources, while also optimizing their allocation.
Results
Laundry Capital can track their business operations on both an organizational and individual store level, feel confident in the results they receive, and make their reporting process easier to maintain going forward.
Innovating the spin cycle with a Custom Tech Stack
Laundry Capital and Extrada Tech worked together in the winter of 2023 to build a platform that would standardize various out-dated processes such as their labour and bonus reporting, client order forms, and inventory management. The new platform needed to not only record and validate user inputs, but also provide feedback on allocating company resources.
The solution was designed to reduce time consuming tasks, alert general managers to real-time business performance, consolidate data for historical analysis, and rely on integrations rather than manual input to source data. After deployment in June 2024, Laundry Capital successfully onboarded all locations, including hundreds of store managers and employees. The process of collecting hard copy reports is now a thing of the past.
The next phase of this project will involve reporting on data collected in the data warehouse. Store managers and executives will have real-time access to store performance, inventory purchasing, labour, and client sales across their business.
Ironing Out the Details:
Azure App Services & PostgreSQL
The app is currently hosted on Azure, using app services to optimize server availability. The PostgreSQL database is configured to provide a high degree of operation parallelization, while leaving plenty of headroom for scalability in the future.
React & NextJS
The use of React and NextJS leveraged the newest features to improve code maintainability. Our React components built with MaterialUI are highly reactive, supporting a host of client devices as is the case with the different client locations.
MiniOrange & WordPress
It was imperative to leverage Laundry Capital's existing authentication protocol on their self-hosted WordPress site to reduce complexity on individual users. The miniOrange WordPress plugin allowed us to maintain a single login per user, regardless of our system, or our clients existing system.
Google Sheets & Zapier
To keep our database up to date with the newest store information (pricing, machine IDs, etc) we were able to replicate the database connection using a Zapier integration. Coupled together, the Zapier integration provided a seamless medium for our clients to update their store data instantly without needing to deal with the database directly.
Azure Data Factory
We leveraged Azure Data Factory to automatically ingest, restructure, and upload data from an SFTP site to our database. This allowed data from 3rd party providers to be continuously kept up-to-date.
ADF was used to read files, file types, file to folders, and archive according to various files that were received. We leveraged ADF as an intermediary to the next phase of this project involving direct API connections to a few of their service providers.
Let's Roadmap Your Solution
We work collaboratively with you to understand your ideal vision, starting by reviewing your current system, workflow, access levels, pain points or time consuming tasks in your current technology stack.