ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION
The measure of a machine
Robots are the fastest-moving story in FM right now, but a robot only earns its place if it outperforms whatever it replaced, and on a mixed fleet, most operators can’t actually see whether it does. Alexander Manafi, CEO of ToolSense, discusses why the future of robotics in FM is won on the dashboard, not the showroom floor.
Walk any cleaning or FM trade show this year, and the robots draw the crowd. Autonomous scrubbers, sweepers and vacuum units, each gliding along a taped-off strip of floor while a rep explains how many hours of labour it saves. The technology is genuinely good and adoption is climbing
fast. Robotics has become the headline act of FM, and for once the hype is mostly earned.
A new scrubber simply does the same job a little better. A robot is bought to replace something: a manual machine, or the hours of the person who used to push it. That changes the only question that matters. Not ‘is it impressive?’ but ‘is it doing what we expected?’. A robot that cleans less area, or costs more to run than the labour it displaced, isn’t automation. It’s an expensive ornament.
The trouble is that most operators cannot answer this question, because they cannot see it.
A serious FM provider rarely runs a single brand. You end up with robots from three or four manufacturers, each arriving with its own cloud portal, its own login and its own app. To compare how one maker’s machine performed against others this week, someone signs into two or three systems, exports two or three reports, and stitches them together in a spreadsheet, if they bother at all.
The data that would prove the business case is technically there, scattered across as many dashboards as you have suppliers. No single view, no like-for-like comparison, no answer.
Getting the value back starts with putting every robot on one screen. When a mixed fleet reports into a single dashboard, the numbers that decide whether automation
32 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING
is working finally sit side by side: cleaning area covered, runtime, tasks completed, water and chemical consumption, cleaning efficiency, and energy and CO2
use.
Suddenly you can see that one robot is covering the square metres it promised while another is quietly idling at a third of the runtime you're paying for. You can compare consumption per square metre across brands. You can prove, to a client or to your own finance director, that the machine is beating what it replaced. Or find out fast that it isn’t.
Plus, a robot only keeps beating it if it keeps running. The operators seeing real returns don’t wait for a breakdown. With live data such as running hours, battery health and error codes, a service gets booked at the first warning sign. Reactive repair becomes preventive maintenance, and the downtime that quietly destroys the business case never happens. Across our customers’ fleets, that discipline is worth around 80% less downtime and a fifth off machine costs over an asset’s life.
This is the work we have put our weight behind. ToolSense now integrates with 15 robot brands, so an operator running a mixed fleet sees every robot, whoever built it, on one dashboard, with cleaning area, runtime, tasks, water and chemical consumption, efficiency and CO2
all in a single
view. No five logins, no stitched-together spreadsheet, no guessing which machine is actually pulling its weight.
The robots on the show floor will keep getting better, and they should, but the winners in FM won’t be the operators with the newest machines. They will be the ones who can see, at a glance, exactly what every robot in the fleet is doing, and prove it is worth more than what it replaced.
www.toolsense.io
x.com/TomoCleaning
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