Assistance Publique – Hopitaux de Marseille is the largest health centre in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, with 3,397 beds and around 2,000 physicians spread across La Timone, Hopital Nord, La Conception and the Hopitaux Sud sites of Sainte-Marguerite and Salvator. Linen for all of them comes out of a single building. The Plateforme Logistique, known internally as the PFL, is a 25,000 square metre facility that opened on 19 April 2013 and houses catering, sterilisation, warehousing and transport alongside the laundry. The laundry alone treats 12 to 14 tonnes of linen a day.

What the audits found

The PFL audited linen handling across the hospital sites and came back with three recurring problems: sorting that was too complex to get right under pressure, bags arriving back at the laundry open rather than sealed, and departments simply running short of bags and sheets. None of those are exotic failures. They are the everyday friction of moving several tonnes of textiles a day between one central plant and dozens of wards.

Three fixes landed before the tracking project. From January 2026 the number of coloured sorting bags was reduced, with the stated aim of limiting sorting errors, securing flows and making the work easier for ward teams and laundry staff alike. The bags themselves moved from snap-button closures to a Fixlock system, intended to stop accidental openings in transit and to improve working conditions for nursing staff handling them. The PFL also bought additional bag stock so departments are less likely to run dry.

Tagging the sheets

The traceability project is the larger piece of work. AP-HM plans to chip its sheets so that each one is read automatically as it arrives at the laundry, then allocated to a site and a department on the way back out. The point is arithmetic rather than policing. Once you know how many sheets a ward actually holds, you can size its allocation properly instead of over-issuing to cover a shrinkage rate nobody has measured.

One caution for anyone reading this as a technical reference. AP-HM has not published a specification. The announcement names no frequency, no tag format, no vendor and no read method, so what follows describes how healthcare laundry RFID is commonly done rather than what Marseille has actually bought.

How linen tagging is usually done

Laundry transponders are built for an environment that destroys ordinary labels. The chip and antenna are encapsulated in materials such as thermoplastic polyurethane or silicone, and the tag is either sewn into a hem or a pouch or heat-sealed onto the fabric. Heat-sealing tends to win when linen already in circulation is being retrofitted, because it is quick and leaves nothing for a patient to feel. Suppliers typically certify laundry tags for 200 or more full industrial cycles covering washing, dewatering, drying, ironing and folding, and healthcare-grade parts are rated to survive sterilising heat and pressure as well. Terms like transponder, encapsulation and read point are explained in the RFID glossary.

The reading side is what makes the economics work. Instead of counting items by hand, plants put read points where the linen has to pass anyway: doorways, conveyors, sorting tables, or tunnels that a loaded trolley rolls through in a single pass. That is the difference between an inventory counted once a quarter and one that updates every time a cage moves. Similar deployments are covered in our garment tags and healthcare sections.

The framing AP-HM uses is worth noting. It presents the laundry as strategically essential, a prerequisite for care rather than a back-office cost, on the grounds that available, compliant and secure linen is part of both clinical quality and patient comfort. At 12 to 14 tonnes a day, a ward that cannot find a clean sheet is a clinical problem, not a housekeeping one, and 60,000 missing sheets a year is the gap between what the plant sends out and what the wards can lay hands on.

Read more at https://fr.ap-hm.fr/actu/blanchisserie-pfl-securiser-le-linge-securiser-le-soin

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

ELIS is the Spanish arm of Elis SA, the French textile, hygiene and facilities services group founded in 1883 and listed on Euronext Paris under the ticker ELI. Elis reported full-year 2025 revenue of 4,796.8 million euros, up 4.9 per cent year on year including 3.8 per cent organic growth, and employs around 54,000 people in 30 countries. It has traded in Spain for roughly 45 years and runs 39 industrial laundries there, serving hospitality, healthcare, social care, retail, industry and cleanroom customers.

What LavanderTrace claims to do

LavanderTrace is LavanderCode’s RFID traceability product for textile rental and laundry operators. According to the company’s own announcement, the deployment covers four points in the garment cycle:

• Identification: every garment carries a unique RFID tag, so each item can be recognised individually rather than as part of a bulk load.
• Reception and sorting: garments arriving at the plant are registered automatically as they pass through RFID reading arches, with no manual scanning step.
• Processing and washing: the movement of each item is logged at each stage of the wash process, which LavanderCode says prevents garments being lost or diverted.
• Despatch and delivery: the system checks that each garment goes back to the customer it came from, closing the loop on traceability.

LavanderCode frames the problem in the terms textile rental operators tend to use: garments going missing, no real-time visibility of where stock sits, and the logistics overhead of getting every item back to the right customer. Its other products include the Lavander 4.0 platform, RFID reading cabinets and arches, an LED-guided garment sorting system, handheld and PDA-based readers and clothing dispensing units. The company is based at Calle Lenguas 18 in Madrid and also sells into care homes and workwear providers.

What the announcement does not say

This is a vendor announcement rather than an independently audited case study, and the claims above are LavanderCode’s. It gives no operating frequency, no tag type or supplier, no garment volumes, no plant names and no deployment dates, so none of those should be inferred. It also publishes no measured result for shrinkage, throughput or sorting accuracy.

As general industry practice rather than a stated detail of this rollout, laundry RFID tags are built to survive hundreds of industrial wash, extraction and press cycles, and are usually sewn into a seam or heat-sealed to the fabric. Reading arches and cabinets are used because they read a full cage or trolley of garments in one pass instead of item by item, which is what makes RFID economic in a plant handling large daily volumes. In textile rental, the commercial case usually rests on knowing where stock is and cutting shrinkage, since every unreturned garment is a replacement cost against a fixed rental fee.

Spanish capacity keeps growing

Elis has been investing in Spanish capacity in parallel. In 2024 it opened Elis Cleanroom Granollers near Barcelona, its third cleanroom-garment laundry in Spain, a 6 million euro investment starting at 59,000 items a week with a second-phase target of 98,000 items a week. It also put 14 million euros into a site at Illescas to add capacity along the Madrid to Toledo corridor.

More coverage of RFID asset tracking and logistics deployments is available in our category archives.

Read more at https://lavandercode.es/elis-espana-implementa-lavandertrace-para-la-trazabilidad-de-prendas

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.