Photographic Area Rug Tracking System
P.A.R.T.S is rug tracking software for cleaning plants. Photograph every rug at collection, tick it through your own wash stages, and prove what condition it arrived in, from a phone, on the floor, with wet hands.
Built and used daily in a working South African rug cleaning plant.
A rug's journey, as your plant already runs it
These are the default stages. Rename them, reorder them, recolour them, retire the ones you do not do. It should read like your plant, not like software. The last one is not a tick box: it is a quality check with a photograph.
The method
Rugs get lost in plants for one reason: once a rug is off the van and on the floor, nothing about it says whose it is. Tracking rugs means giving every rug an identity at the moment it leaves the client's house, and recording every time it moves. Six steps, and none of them need a barcode.
The photograph is the identity. A number written on a job card tells you nothing when you are standing in front of forty rolled rugs; a picture tells you immediately. Take it in the lounge, before the rug is rolled. The date and time are printed into the picture itself, so they travel with it.
Size, shape, what it is made of and its colours, on one screen, in under a minute. Tap a risky fibre, or a colour that bleeds, and the warning appears there and then. The job number comes with it: one job card per collection, numbered J-1042, with each rug on it numbered J-1042-03, so the paperwork and the rug agree from the start. You do not need tags. If your plant already tags its rugs, type the tag number in and the rug is tracked by it as well.
Every mark, tear, stain and worn fringe that is already there, with one-tap buttons for the usual ones (pet urine, moth, dye bleed, previous repairs) so nobody types with one hand. This is the record you produce when somebody says the fringe was fine when they gave it to you.
Received, dusting, washing, drying: your stages, named the way your plant names them. One tap per rug, stamped with the time and the operator's name, and an Undo beside every tick that is itself recorded. The stage is the answer to "where is my rug?". A plant whose stages are places does not need a second list of shelf numbers going stale.
The last stage is a quality check, not a tick box. Photograph the finished rug, answer your plant's own checks (clean edge to edge, dry to the backing, fringes finished) Yes or No, and press one button. It reads Passed or Send back to Washing, depending on the answers. A failed rug goes back to the right stage on its own, and the failure stays in its history.
Only a job whose rugs have all passed can go on the van. At the van, compare the rug in your hands to the picture taken at collection. This is the last moment a mix-up is cheap to fix, and it is the step that stops Mrs Naidoo receiving Mr Botha's rug. Delivered is a separate tap at the door.
On the floor
Photographed on a phone, in a working plant, on real jobs. There is no menu bar to learn: the home screen is one search box over the open jobs, oldest first, and every other screen has a single link back to it.
When the job is done
The moment a job is marked delivered, the office gets one email that closes it out. Each rug has its own card, showing the photograph taken on arrival, any damage photographed at collection, and the photograph taken on the way back. Under them are its size, its fibres, any damage noted at collection, and the job's total area, ready to invoice from. Re-cleans are marked do not invoice and left out of the total.
What it does
If a feature needed a subsystem to explain it, it is not in here.
Booked in at the client, on a phone, in under a minute. The number goes on the job card; the picture is how anyone recognises it later.
Your own process, your own stage names. One tap per rug, timestamped, with the operator's name on it. "Where is Mrs Naidoo's rug?" takes one search.
Condition photographs from the day of collection, with the date and time printed into them, and a record of who did what to the rug and when. Save or share any photograph straight from the rug to WhatsApp or email. One argument settled pays for a year of this.
Tap "viscose" at intake, or a black or red on a wool rug, and the warning appears immediately, and again on every stage screen for that rug. It is the mistakes that never happen that you never hear about.
A photograph of the finished rug and your plant's own checklist, answered Yes or No. A fail sends the rug back to the stage that fixes it, and nothing goes on the van until every rug on the job has passed.
One email to your own staff when the last rug on a job passes, and one when it is delivered, with every rug's size and the job's total area for invoicing. Re-cleans are marked "do not invoice". You choose which mails go and what they say.
A rug is identified by its photograph and the number on the job card, so nothing has to be stapled, pinned or sewn to it. If your plant already tags rugs, switch tags on: the tag number sits on the rug's record beside its damage photographs and is found from the search box while the rug is in the building. It stays internal: no report or email shows it.
Collect rugs at a client with no reception at all: photographs, sizes, damage notes, the lot. It holds them on the phone, says plainly that nothing has been sent yet, and sends when you are back in range.
Photographs are compressed when a job is delivered and deleted thirty days later. The written record (client, size, damage, who did what) is kept for good, and the delivered report keeps the photographs in your own inbox for as long as you want them.
Deliberately absent
Half of what makes this fast on a plant floor is what was left out.
Ownership
Privacy
Your clients' names, phone numbers, addresses and photographs of their homes are personal information. P.A.R.T.S is designed to hold as little of it as the job needs, for no longer than it is useful, and to show nobody who should not see it.
Price
The same price whether you do ten rugs a day or a hundred.
No per-rug charges, no tiers, and no annual contract.
Straight answers
Photograph each rug at collection, give it a job number written on the paper job card, and record every stage it passes through. The photograph identifies the rug when nothing else can, the number ties it to the client's paperwork, and the stage history answers where it is and what has been done to it.
Physical tags are the common alternative, and on their own they fail in predictable ways: they come off in the wash, they get reprinted wrong, and a rug with no tag is a rug with no identity. If your plant tags anyway, P.A.R.T.S tracks the tag alongside the photograph, so a lost tag never means a lost rug.
No. Barcodes and RFID assume you can attach something to the item and that it survives the process. Rugs go through dusting, immersion, spinning and drying, and anything attached either comes off or has to be removed and reattached at every step.
It also means nothing is stapled, pinned, taped or sewn to a rug to keep track of it. Those leave holes, rust marks and torn fringes: damage done by the very thing that was meant to protect you from a damage claim.
A photograph taken at collection, a number on the job card, and a person comparing the two is the mechanism most plants already use informally. P.A.R.T.S makes it reliable rather than replacing it.
A plant doing enough volume to tag every rug can still do so. Type the tag number in at collection and it is tracked with the rug's damage photographs and found from the search box while the rug is in the building. Tags are reused once a rug goes home, so search only ever finds the rug carrying that number now.
Photograph the damage at the client's house, before the rug is rolled or loaded, and record a written note beside it. A dated photograph taken at collection, together with a stage history showing who handled the rug and when, settles almost every dispute in one conversation.
In P.A.R.T.S the date and time are printed into every photograph, so the picture you send a client carries its own proof of when it was taken. Any photograph can be saved or shared from the rug card. The system keeps them while the job is open and for thirty days after delivery. The delivered report emailed to the office attaches them at full size, so they stay on file for as long as you keep that email. The written damage notes are kept permanently.
By checking each rug against its collection photograph at the moment it is loaded for delivery. Mix-ups almost never happen on the plant floor. They happen at the van, when similar rugs from different jobs are being loaded at the same time.
P.A.R.T.S puts a checklist at exactly that moment: each rug on the job with its photograph and dimensions, ticked off as it goes onto the van. The job cannot be marked delivered until it has been through that step.
With a short quality check at the end of the process: photograph the finished rug, then answer a handful of questions (clean edge to edge, dry to the backing, fringes and pile finished, smells clean, damage notes still accurate) Yes or No. Keep the list short. A checklist of fifteen gets tapped through without being read.
In P.A.R.T.S the checks are your plant's own, edited in settings, and each one names the stage a failure sends the rug back to. A rug that fails goes back automatically, the failure stays in its history, and nothing can be loaded for delivery until every rug on the job has passed.
Viscose and art silk, jute and sisal, and anything tanned such as hide or leather should not be wet cleaned without a deliberate decision, because they stain, shrink or fall apart. Wool, silk and cotton need care over pH and agitation rather than avoidance. Colour matters too: black, red and blue dyes are the ones most likely to bleed into a pale field, so test for colourfastness first.
P.A.R.T.S asks for the fibre and colours at intake and shows the warning immediately, then again on every stage screen for that rug, so the warning reaches the person at the wash bay rather than staying on a form.
In the van, yes. Collecting rugs at a client and signing off a delivery both work with no signal at all. The phone holds the photographs and details and sends them when it is back in range, showing plainly that nothing has been sent yet.
On the plant floor, no, and deliberately. Stage ticks are never queued: a tick that looks saved but is not is worse than one that visibly failed.
P.A.R.T.S is R2 100 once for setup and training, then R485 a month with everything included, with no per-rug charges, no tiers and no annual contract. The price is the same whether the plant does ten rugs a day or a hundred. The system is improved continuously and every update is included, so you are always on the latest version, and a new feature never arrives with a new price.
It is built to support both. It collects only what the job needs, deletes photographs thirty days after delivery, never contacts your clients and never shares their details. Each plant has its own database, photos are kept in private storage, and every change is recorded against the person who made it.
Under both laws, compliance is the plant's responsibility, because the plant decides what its clients' information is used for. P.A.R.T.S gives you the tools to meet that responsibility. It does not meet it for you.
Under a minute per rug on a phone: one photograph, the size, the shape, the fibre, the colours, and whether there is damage. The whole intake is designed around an operator with one free hand, and it is timed with a stopwatch on real hardware rather than estimated.
Next step
It is easiest to show you. I run a rug cleaning plant myself and this is what we use every day. I will come to you, show you the real system with real jobs in it, and let your own operators book in a rug and see how long it takes them.
