A cost-accounting system used in a hospital-related laundry facility

A laundry facility supplying linen to several hospitals needs to keep a good account of the numbers of different types of linen which enter and leave its premises so as to allocate the costs fairly and equitably among member hospitals. This task is made difficult by the problem of errors in counting due to high volume, different sizes and shapes of linen pieces, and human error in sorting. An electronic counting system has been installed in the premises to facilitate the process of counting, and this paper describes an approach for correcting the counting errors by applying factors that account for the inherent error in the system. These factors are estimated from sampling the contents of the sorted linen and statistical analysis of the resulting data. An efficient sampling scheme is proposed.