Dutta Dry Cleaners: Operations Essay

Dutta Dry Cleaners

The Dry Cleaning industry provides garment cleaning services and in most cases will provide related services such as clothes pressing and finishing. The dry cleaning process is physically very similar to the home laundry process, except that clothes are washed in dry cleaning solvent instead of water. Fabric or garment cleaning consists of three basic functions: cleaning, drying and finishing.   Garments are pre-treated for stains, and then machine washed in a solution of a solvent, soaps and detergents.   The solvent is extracted by first draining, and then spinning the clothes. Finally, the garments are dried through a combination of aeration, heat and tumbling, and then they are pressed.
Indian Scenario
The dry cleaning industry is INR 5000 crore in size, and is fragmented in nature. There are some big players like Pressto, but in major cities of India, the small players are the major service providers.
Our Scope
The highly fragmented nature of the industry leads to a lot of small stores offering the same service. The operation is at a small scale and the level of efficiency of the players is extremely low. We aim to explore of how the learning of our course on service operations can be used in this industry. We will be studying “Dutta Drycleaners”, one of the largest dry cleaning service providers in the city of Raipur, and see how the operations in the industry can be optimized. We would further look at whether the recommendations coming out of our study can be applied to the industry in India at large, based upon secondary analysis of the sector.