FLOORCARE & MAINTENANCE
“What nearly cost the business €15,000 was simply not knowing where its own asset had gone.”
The real cost of floorcare
Robots and batteries get all the attention in floorcare. What actually erodes contract margins are machines that won’t start on a Monday morning, scrubbers nobody can locate once contracts move on, and services that get missed until clients ask to see paperwork. Alexander Manafi, ToolSense CEO, discusses why, across a fleet spread over many sites, the cost lives in asset maintenance and operations management.
A few years ago, one of our customers bought a ride-on floor scrubber for a single demanding site, at a cost of around €15,000. Then they lost the contract to a competitor. On most operations a machine like that quietly disappears, written off and replaced the next time another site needs one.
This one came back, because it carried a QR code and was visible on our platform. The team could see exactly where it was: still parked at the premises of the client they no longer worked for, quietly cleaning floors for the competition. So, they made the call nobody enjoys, asked the client they had just lost whether they might have their scrubber back, and got it. The machine had done nothing wrong. What nearly cost the business €15,000 was simply not knowing where its own asset had gone.
I think about that whenever the industry talks about floorcare, because the focus of those conversations is usually wrong.
This issue is about floorcare and maintenance, and most of the attention goes to the floorcare. The machines are excellent, with batteries lasting far longer than they used to, but a scrubber dryer spends maybe an hour a day actually scrubbing. The rest of the time it is charging, waiting, being shuttled between sites, coming due for a PUWER check or a PAT test, or sitting broken in a cupboard while a supervisor works the phones instead of the shift.
The larger the operation, the harder it is to see any of it. A mixed fleet means scrubbers from one maker, sweepers from another, robots from a third and vans from a fourth, each turning up with its own portal, its own login and its own app. To answer a single question, how many machines
44 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING
do we run and which are due a service, an ops manager signs into four or five systems across as many devices, then falls back on a spreadsheet and memory anyway. Few could give you the number to the nearest machine, and on a multi-site contract the kit runs well into six figures.
What protects your margin is less the machine you buy than the maintenance behind it, and more and more, the maintenance done before anything goes wrong. The best operators have stopped waiting for things to break. With a QR code on every asset and Internet of Things-based (IoT) live data from the bigger machines tracking running hours, battery health and fault codes, a service gets booked on the first sign of trouble rather than the morning the machine dies.
Reactive repair turns into preventive maintenance, and on a fleet that adds up: ToolSense customers see around 80% less downtime and a fifth off machine costs over an asset’s life. It only works if it’s simple enough that a cleaner can scan and report in seconds, with no app and no login, otherwise the frontline never touches it.
Operators with the most to lose moved first. In the UK and Ireland, contract cleaners and FM providers such as ISS, Spectrum Services and TCFM now run fleets this way, swapping pen, paper and Excel for a single live picture of every asset. ISS alone manages a global fleet of more than 500,000 machines on the platform. At that scale, guessing gets expensive fast.
So buy the newest scrubber, by all means. It’ll still let you down on a Monday if nobody’s maintaining it, or if you cannot lay hands on it when it matters. In floorcare, the real cost hides in the time between the cleans, and getting it back is a question of how you run the operation.
www.toolsense.io x.com/TomoCleaning
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