What Might A New Cleaning Process Look Like?
Labour shortages, increased pressures to do more with less, supply chain issues causing delays in every sector. These are the realities facing every industry and the cleaning sector is no different.
P L – Housekeeping manager
How do we fix some of the Cleaning Process concerns? It may involve change. The likelihood of things going back to the way they were prior to the 2020 – 2022 Covid pandemic is very unlikely. The often heard sentence, “we have always done it this way”, can not solve a situation where you have no one to actually do the work, there is no one to do “it” the old way. Perhaps you can’t even get the material to do “it” the old way.
There is only one choice – Change the way we do it.
Don’t look at this as a bad thing. There were so many awful even wrong things happening in the cleaning world. Imagine using a spray deodorizer to mask the smell of urine on the floor of a washroom. Why would you not clean up the floor instead? A possible reason is the wrong tools were provided to the staff to physically do the job. There is no way a string mop and dirty water in a bucket can be expected to pickup the material. The mop simply spreads the material across the floor, depositing solids into the grout lines and allowing the bacteria to multiply and decay. Dead bodies smell so let’s remove them. After all that is the definition of cleaning – The removal and safe disposal of unwanted material. We don’t want the material on the floor so get rid of it.
The change in this scenario is to get rid of the mop, allow the cleaning to be completed properly and more effectively, easier and using less human resources. Yup – a faster quicker picker upper.
The KaiVac No-Touch Cleaning System for example can remove 99% of the material left by the mop. The task of cleaning a washroom can be completed 50% faster allowing a single employee to be re-tasked to do other things. Why wouldn’t we look at this change as positive? The added benefits are the employee never needs to be on their knees in front of a toilet, the need for a spray deodorizer is eliminated and the washroom is clean, not just having an appearance of being clean.
Enough of That.
The next generation of cleaning “staff” is already upon us. The use of fully automated, robotic, workers has started to appear in many venues. Warehouses, shopping malls, schools and even residential occupancies are using robots to clean. They can perform the mundane repetitive tasks while the human workers focus on the details and critical, deep clean tasks.
Don’t jump to the least expensive version of a robot. Can the robot complete the task in the allotted time, will there be a need for daily oversight (programming)? The most important feature of any cleaning program is reporting. Whether it is a human or a robot doing the work we must know if the task has been completed. Before you make a purchase be certain your robot can provide a report of its’ completed task.
FieldBot – Cleanfix S170 Navi
IHS Depot has chosen to work with the CleanFix S170 Navi robot and the FieldBot program. We have completed extensive testing of the product and have found the performance, ease of use and the reporting features make this robot the “unit of choice” for commercial occupancies. Up to 4 hours of run time, fully programmable schedules, reporting that far exceeds any other unit on the market. All of these and many more features made our selection simple.
