Technologies in Cleaning. Saving Money, Facilitating Management

Yury Latyshev
Director
Premier-Service

The history of great companies all over the world gives us a great number of examples showing that companies that were pioneers in adopting various technical innovations achieved the best performance. For the market it is difficult to accept novelties, but the proper use of them provides a positive savings rate and makes managing them easier.

In Europe, cleaning companies use technologies widely at every stage of work. Mainly they are intended to increase labor productivity. Building owners consider technology as a way to make the object more profitable now and to retain profitability in the long run. Our Western colleagues estimate that timely and professional service activities in buildings cut down expenses for the maintenance significantly — by up to 30 percent. We ourselves managed to reduce the volume of handwork and/or improve the quality of cleaning due to applied technologies. If a client spends money to clean he will be able to avoid paying for a major overhaul, which could be much more expensive.

The acceptance of technical novelties is restrained partly by the stereotype that "high technologies are expensive." It does not mean that every owner should invest in technologies. Outsourcing can solve the problem of applying technologies for less money. Every industry has its leaders, and they are the ones to adopt and to develop innovations. If a company works for the moment as well as for the future it will invest in development, study technologies, adopt them and control the correct use of them. Search your contractors for effective solutions.

German companies offer interesting technical novelties. In Germany, companies successfully use technologies discriminated by the type of location, as standards of cleaning at educational, medical, office and industrial premises and cafes and restaurants are quite different. There is a very interesting method of foam washing that is used in all catering establishments in Germany. A foam gun sprays detergent onto all surfaces. After the period of time required for the detergent to work (five to 10 minutes) the surfaces are washed with water from the gun. What is more, catering establishments are built taking into account that the premises will be cleaned that way. At the stages of designing and building, two things are taken into consideration: Floors and walls should be tiled and there should be a water outlet in the floor.

At sites with strict requirements for the quality of cleaning, such as medical, industrial or luxury premises, a system of prepared-in-advance cleaning instruments is employed — the Pro-Mop system. Pro-Mop is a patented system of cleaning that eradicates dirt and infections carried from one room to another. The system eliminates using and moving tanks with detergent solutions around the area. Specially prepared (washed, disinfected and impregnated with detergents) mops and tissues are used for cleaning. Washing, disinfecting and preliminary impregnating cleaning fabrics are performed with a completely automated system documenting the whole technical process. The Pro-Mop system provides the highest hygiene standard according to the RKI classification (Robert Koch Institute, Germany).

In Europe a lot of attention must be paid to preventative measures. Site managers should use cleaning and surface-protecting methods from the very beginning of the location functioning and they should do it correctly and in time. Let's take for example the protection of surfaces with polymeric coating. Polymeric coating is ecological, the processed surface looks great, it breathes and requires less detergent and less time for cleaning. The economic benefit is obvious, and in the long term it will amount to a considerable sum of money. All the more so, the money spent for cleaning will save the client's money for repairs and replacement of surfaces spoiled with incorrect maintenance. The customer and the contractor have to be genuine partners.

Nowadays, when customers in Russia have the experience of creating their own services and involving professional maintenance and cleaning companies, they have evidence that outsourcing is worthwhile. If cleaning services offer solutions to make building maintenance easier, the involvement of professional companies will develop even more rapidly. High-quality services with accurate support and market prices are possible if technologies are introduced into practice.

At the moment, the most important factors of choice of a service provider on the market are partners' recommendations and good reputation of the company. To earn the reputation of a high-quality service provider and to keep it means to search for new, successful ways of working out problems and to adopt technologies. The quickest and the most effective ones will win.