Are you washing good dollars down the drain?

Facility managers know that productivity costs are often much higher than energy costs . Unfortunately, too much emphasis is put on reducing product costs when it is actually wise to also look at labour costs that can drive a lot of expense.

Many forms of waste are obvious, but others are not so easy to see without looking in unexpected places for them. Using LEAN principles, our consultants at Kimberly-Clark Professional™ can help you uncover and identify problems that our customers have and offer solutions for ‘continuous improvement’.
Our team has been trained to identify opportunities to maximise efficiencies, helping create healthier, safer and more productive work environments.

So what are we wasting precious dollars on?

Through years of experience and consultations with countless facility managers, we have identified eight broad categories of labour waste in washroom management that can lead to avoidable inefficiencies. These include:

1. Defective or withdrawn products – poor quality checks can cause a waste in time and money when staff have to check, return and repurchase items.
2. Overproduction or over-purchasing and as a result, expenditure on unnecessary storage.
3. Waiting time of your products sitting in storage.
4. Not utilising resources to their maximum abilities by failing to equip them with the right knowledge and know-how.
5. Transportation – Is the product packaging efficient, taking up less space on trucks and reducing the number of trucks required for transport?
6. Inventory – Orders are sometimes poorly calculated and results in inconsistent inventory. These items that sit in the inventory and are not being actively processed to add value contributes to waste.
7. Motion – Are your washroom staff suffering from repetitive injuries or frequent accidents? Or simply spending too much time in motion on the wrong tasks.
8. Excessive processing – Is too much effort spent on things such as ad hoc cleaning or paper roll changing than is actually required?

Just how much could you save?
Compromising on a quality clean could risk managers losing contracts. In fact, many managers compromise on better products for their washroom thinking it could lessen costs, without realising this could result in a drop in the number of tenants in the long run.

Make your first move towards developing a long-term washroom strategy.
KCP can help our customers with internal and external benchmarking, focused on washroom operations. Internal benchmarking will provide insights on floor-to-floor needs, or washroom-to-washroom needs, that should be addressed differently for the best results. For instance, high traffic washrooms may need to be cleaned or topped up more often in order to reduce complaints – but just how often and when can be difficult to determine.

As a first step, we recommend you determine exactly how efficient your washroom strategy is by booking an appointment with us and we’ll send a Kimberly-Clark Professional™ representative to give you a FREE consultation.

Staples white paper, How to Reduce Labor Costs , KCP Customer Experience Training Kit Module 2_1b, page 3