LEISURE & RETAIL THE INNOVATION DISCOUNT
Retailers, more than ever, have to be street-smart to survive. But they can learn a trick or two from adopting novel yet effective cleaning techniques, according to James White of Denis Rawlins Ltd.
Retailers are highly competitive, extremely cost- conscious, and always innovating, looking for the next ‘big thing’. All true, no doubt, but it isn’t always this way when it comes to cleaning in their own stores.
Travelling the country, advising and training clients and their cleaning teams (as well as shopping), we’ve seen the tell-tale signs. Here are five areas where some fresh thinking by facilities managers can clinch a better deal for retailers and their customers.
Let’s start, at the entrance, with the obvious – prevention is better, and cheaper, than cure. Good-quality matting stops 80-90% of moisture and soils entering a building, saving on cleaning time and costs. Matting designed by architects adorns most shopping centres. Their aluminium and plastic may look the part, but they don’t trap dirt or absorb water.
Quality mats that can be cleaned easily along with adjacent floors save money. They are far more cost- effective than renting extra mats for rainy spells. In winter, daily entrance mat cleaning is essential to manage the risk of slips and falls.
Now let’s turn to the ‘special’ cases, where facilities managers tend to schedule periodic deep cleans and often call in the specialists. This is a three-pronged problem.
Washrooms and toilets are used intensively in many retail premises. Armed with mops and buckets, plus sprays and cloths, cleaning staff are fighting a losing battle. Germs and toxins embedded in every crevice spread infections and bad odours. It’s demeaning and self-defeating work.
By contrast, spraying all surfaces with cleaning solution and wet-suctioning away the soils leaves washroom toilets clinically clean and fresh. Such a system (Kaivac’s No Touch Cleaning) can take a third of the time of manual methods, providing a daily deep clean (perhaps overnight) in the same time as a spot clean. Given that labour is the biggest part of the cleaning budget, that translates into savings as well as benefits.
Mopping or standard floor cleaning kit can damage the workings of escalators. But that doesn’t mean expensive specialist cleaning, every six months, is the best solution. A modern, manual system that’s lightweight and low- tech, is highly effective and requires minimal training. A full escalator can be cleaned in 15 minutes – for as little as £6.50 in consumable costs. So cleaning can be done weekly, in-house, for less, and with better grip and cleanliness. The same system (REN Clean) can rapidly clean up spills on escalators.
High-level areas are another space that are often left – to accumulate dust – and then, to the specialists. Ultra- lightweight carbon-fibre poles combined with a high-
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powered vacuum do the job from the ground floor – so mobile work platforms and scissor-lifts are not required.
Combined with an in-built video camera, the system (such as SpaceVac) allows the operative to view and record cleaning progress safely from ground level. Internal and external glass can be cleaned with a similar way high- reach solution using pure water. And a last tip, on that commonplace event that causes most inconvenience and a slip hazard to customers:
A rapid, no-fuss response is needed for spills. A ‘crash cart’ – the size of a shopping trolley, with trash bin, litter picker, wet vac, hose and wand, and automatic mopping – allows any staff member to tackle the spill in seconds. Such a system (the OmniFlex™ SUV™) leaves a perfectly dried floor, so there’s no need for ‘wet floor’ signs or accident claims.
And in times of snow or heavy rain, the same cart can be used to clean entrance mats and surrounding floor areas of water, salt, grit and dirt. Retailers can make tidy savings from simply smarter cleaning kit – it’s what we call ‘return on innovation’.
www.rawlins.co.uk twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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