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Slow take-up at dishwashing facility 'shows productivity push needs mindset change'

SINGAPORE — Despite being set up in March, the first on-site centralised dishwashing facility in Singapore is facing slow take-up in a setback for the drive towards higher productivity, with fewer than 20 food and beverage outlets utilising its services even though it has the capacity to clean crockery from 100 such eateries.

SINGAPORE — Despite being set up in March, the first on-site centralised dishwashing facility in Singapore is facing slow take-up in a setback for the drive towards higher productivity, with fewer than 20 food and beverage outlets utilising its services even though it has the capacity to clean crockery from 100 such eateries.

Costing about S$1.2 million, 70 per cent of which is funded by enterprise development agency SPRING Singapore, the facility at IMM is a collaboration between dishwashing services provider GreatSolutions and CapitaLand Mall Asia, with support from SPRING, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the National Environment Agency (NEA), and the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i). It currently caters to six F&B tenants in IMM and 13 F&B operators from surrounding malls such as Westgate, JCube and The Star Vista.

“At this point in time, the pick-up rate is still a little bit slow. So, that is where we need to go out and try and see how we can accelerate this programme, make people understand that there is a mindset change needed, the change management that is required at the F&B level,” said Mr Wilson Tan, chief executive of CapitaLand Mall Trust Management.

The on-site facility, spanning 7,000 sq ft within the mall, has seven automated dishwashing lines, including a dedicated line to serve halal eateries. Until it was set up, centralised dishwashing facilities in Singapore had been located off-site in areas such as Senoko and Tai Seng, often far away from F&B outlets.

With the on-site service, participating F&B outlets can achieve substantial productivity and manpower savings of 50 to 80 per cent in man-hours, and they no longer have to hire dishwashing workers. Meanwhile, eateries with dishwashing workers can redeploy these employees to higher-value roles, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said today (Nov 9). For example, at Lian Peng Bak Kut Teh in IMM, staff can focus on food preparation and customer service. The restaurant would also be able to increase its seating capacity by 10 per cent, using the space that would otherwise be allocated to dishwashing.

On the visit to the facility today, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies, said: “This is an important pilot. It is our first on-site centralised dishwashing facility in a mall, a large-sized mall. We are using this as a pilot so that we can learn what the problems are ... the problems for the individual, F&B operators, and the problems for the mall itself.”

“Every aspect of the domestic services sector — F&B and retail — needs to be relooked at quite fundamentally, because we are going to run out of manpower quite soon ... We can’t keep growing our foreign manpower,” said Mr Shanmugaratnam, who is also the chairman of the National Productivity Council. “We must look at every possible solution of operating profitably and paying good wages for good jobs in a manpower-tight economy. That’s the nub of the matter,” he added.

SPRING will continue to work closely with service providers as well as F&B and mall operators to set up more of such on-site centralised dishwashing facilities, the MTI said.

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