Professional facility management companies know enough to maintain a healthy inventory of cleaning supplies. Unfortunately, this is not always the case when businesses keep maintenance and cleaning in-house. Because cleaning and maintenance isn’t their specialty, maintaining an inventory of cleaning supplies is more of an afterthought than anything else.
Whether you run a restaurant, offer professional services, or operate an industrial enterprise, your best bet for thorough and sanitary cleaning is to outsource with a commercial cleaning services provider. In the absence of such a partnership, it is a wise idea to maintain a healthy inventory of cleaning supplies. Here are five reasons explaining why:
1. Running Out Impairs Cleaning
A good way to impair your cleaning and maintenance staff is to let them run out of cleaning supplies. For example, consider the restaurant with an on-staff maintenance worker who mops the floors overnight. At 3 o’clock on a Sunday morning, he realizes there’s no more floor cleaner. Where can he go to buy more?
His two options are to find something else to mop the floors with or forgo mopping that night. Neither option is ideal. Having to make the choice could have been avoided had management done a better job of keeping an ample supply of floor cleaner on hand.
2. Running Out Can Get Expensive
It’s possible to run out of a particular cleaning supply even when you make a point of keeping an eye on inventory. Even commercial cleaning services have this problem from time to time. But if it happens too often, it can get pretty expensive.
Companies save money when they buy their cleaning supplies in bulk. Run out of a particular cleaning product and it may not be possible to wait until the next bulk order arrives. An emergency supply needs to be purchased to keep the cleaning crew working. Unfortunately, smaller amounts tend to cost more by volume.
3. Emergencies Are Waiting to Happen
It is also important to keep a healthy inventory of cleaning supplies for the simple fact that emergencies are just waiting to happen. Cleaning crews never know what might befall them on any given day. Consider industrial cleaning. Imagine a machine shop facing the aftermath of a CNC failure that spilled cooling fluid all over the floor.
The cleaning crew is going to need extra materials to clean up the mess. Not having what they need means doing a less-than-adequate job. By extension, this could jeopardize the health and safety of workers on the floor. It’s yet another situation that good cleaning supply inventory management could have avoided.
4. Managers Take Vacations
Ordering cleaning supplies generally falls to management. Whether you are talking industrial, office, or business cleaning, it’s generally not the cleaning crew that actually manages inventory. That’s fine, but what happens when managers take vacations? If a crew is running low on certain cleaning supplies a few days before a scheduled vacation, they could potentially run out while the boss is gone. Then what?
5. Cleaning Crews Have More Options
Finally, maintaining a healthy inventory of cleaning supplies gives cleaning crews more options for addressing those unusual jobs. Maybe a cleaning crew is faced with an industrial spill they have never seen before. They don’t know what cleaning supplies they will need to address it. Having a healthy inventory of supplies on hand gives them more options to choose from.
If your company handles cleaning and maintenance in-house, be sure to maintain a healthy inventory of cleaning supplies. Better yet, outsource cleaning and maintenance to a professional cleaning services provider. Outsourcing means forgetting about maintenance and cleaning altogether – including cleaning supply inventories.
