For weary travelers there’s nothing more enticing than a comfortable bed with fresh linens. After a day of traveling, they check in at a hotel, enter their room, and find the bed just in the nick of time. But a hotel bed can arrive just in the nick of time for hoteliers as well.
Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing for bedding is a way for hotels to ensure their mattresses are both cost-efficient and consistent across properties. “The advantages are efficiency, keeping labor costs down, and being able to completely spin our inventory a number of times,” says Mark Koch, director of the hospitality division at Denver Mattress, a manufacturer of mattresses that uses JIT manufacturing.
The idea behind JIT manufacturing is that Denver Mattress doesn’t inventory any raw materials for any period of time. “We get an order daily and we make it daily—as many as 1,000 mattresses per day,” Koch says.
Those efficiencies at the plant can translate to better quality mattresses for hotels, says Chris Valentino, sales manager at Denver Mattress. “The fact that there aren’t any products sitting here being stored means less chance of any damage,” Valentino says. “The raw material comes in that day, it’s used that day, and it’s put on a truck and it’s gone.”
“In the hospitality industry, because everything is made in one facility, and not in satellite plants, what’s in the mattress is the same in Brooklyn as it is in L.A.,” Koch adds. “Product consistency is very high.”
Koch says that owners with multiple properties can have mattresses that can truly be branded as consistent experiences from hotel to hotel. He also says that the costs for hoteliers can potentially go down.
“If anything it will go down because of the way we order raw materials,” he says. “We have incredible buying power because we make everything under one roof.”
Mattresses themselves are one of the main amenities for hotel rooms. For hoteliers high-quality mattresses with lasting power are essential for cost-effective operations. “They want their quality to last,” Valentino says. “Mattresses used to be just part of a hotel, but if you take the mattress out of a hotel you just have a room there. If you take everything else out and leave the mattress you still have a hotel room. It is the key part of the room.”
That leaves hoteliers demanding high quality from mattresses using high quality materials. For example, Koch says Denver Mattress does not use fiber in its products, because the material doesn’t last long.
“We try to go above and beyond what is needed,” Valentino adds. That includes improving quality and efficiency through the manufacturing process.
