Today’s facilities are capital-intensive tools used to drive better performance while supporting and enhancing overall business efficiency. Maximizing the value delivered through facility assets and services is paramount for senior leaders. But a large part of facility costs, particularly in maintenance, is tied to labor. It's this area where progressive facility managers are exploring innovation strategies.  

At the ISSA 2018 trade show last year, we hosted an industry panel at which four of our customers shared their experiences evaluating and deploying the Neo commercial floor scrubbing robot. The cost and consistency of labor were highlighted as the key drivers of automation. 

“We have about 25,000 employees that work within our commercial cleaning business. Operating in North America, a cleaner now costs anywhere from $35,000-$45,000. The cost of labor is becoming very, very expensive. As well, the ability to get labor and get labor consistently is becoming more and more of a challenge. 12-15% of our workers don’t show up every day, so think about juggling that over millions and millions of square feet. Labor is one of the most significant drivers to automation we face today.”

As we state in our blog post, Why Robots Expand, Rather Than Replace, Jobs and Human Potential, we believe automation is a vital tool in helping facility operations teams improve efficiency, consistency and cleaning performance. In our experience, Neo isn't deployed at facilities to  replace  cleaning staff but instead to work  alongside  them. Floor scrubbing automation releases time for operations teams to perform more important or time-consuming tasks during their shifts. 

“Automation is really the next holy grail for us. In our business, it’s innovating or die. By having robots do repetitive, monotonous work, we can then have the humans do more important work, which is interfacing with our clients, being more intuitive, and it’s a huge part of our strategy going forward.”