August 22, 2022

Avidbots Neo helps Cirka revamp floor care with smart robotics

Cirka is a cleaning and facility services company that services more than 150 contracts throughout Australia and the UK. With more than 30 years of experience as a provider of high-quality cleaning and property services, Cirka understands what it takes to build successful partnerships with customers.

One such customer is Myer Centre, a heritage-listed building in Adelaide’s Central Business District (CBD). Myer Centre is a five-level, multi-use building with extensive cleaning requirements.

As Daniel Dmytrenko, South Australia State Manager at Cirka explains, “Myer Centre is located on Adelaide’s busiest retail precinct. As a result, it is subject to considerable foot traffic, which brings obvious cleaning and maintenance challenges.”

Relying on manual floor care equipment to maintain cleanliness across such a large facility has several limitations. Ride-on and walk-behind floor scrubbers are less efficient and productive than fully autonomous solutions, and they lack the ability to track and measure their performance, resulting in potential cleaning blind spots and missed areas. And because they always require a human operator, the ability to reallocate cleaning labor to high-traffic, customer-facing or revenue-generating areas of a facility is not possible.

Cirka’s custodial teams are extremely diligent operators, but implementing a smarter way to meet this facility’s cleaning needs could boost their floor care operations even further.

With that in mind, Cirka searched for a solution that could overcome potential challenges while optimizing worker efficiency.

In late 2020, Cirka began to explore automation to help manage floor care at Myer Centre. But not all autonomous floor scrubbing robots are created equal, and one option stood above the rest — Neo, Avidbots’ fully autonomous, end-to-end solution.

Starting in January 2021, Neo was deployed across all five floors of Myer Centre.

Dmytrenko recalls why Cirka chose Avdibots’ solution: “Neo demonstrated the most impressive AI. We felt that other options were manual scrubbers with AI added on. Neo is first and foremost a robot, and demonstrates more intelligence and flexibility when it comes to working autonomously.”

 


Neo delivering a fully autonomous clean at Myer Centre

 

Progress through automation: Enter Neo

There is an old saying: "Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher."

This has proven true at the Myer Centre in Adelaide, where Neo has surrounded itself with the quality operators from Cirka. The results were impressive.

In July 2022 alone — over a year since Neo’s initial deployment — Cirka deployed Neo every single day, showcasing how Neo continuously improves its performance. Neo’s dependability has shone a new light on cleaning and floor care at Myer Centre.

Cirka was blown away by the uplift to both facility cleanliness and, surprisingly, to the entirety of their service delivery.

“Introducing Neo has completely changed the way we do night duty, and we’ve redesigned every role and found real efficiencies and improvement in delivery across the board since deploying Neo over a year ago,” says Dmytrenko.

But clean floors were just one benefit among many. As Dmytrenko points out, automation allowed Cirka to maximize their cleaning potential by operating after hours, as well as the ability to deploy staff more strategically.

“As a premium retail and commercial space in Adelaide, floor presentation is a key priority for Cirka and our clients,” says Dmytrenko. “Neo allows us to perform nightly scrubs without increasing labor, and therefore costs. It also frees up our cleaning team to deliver more detailed, technical cleans.”

“Automating the floor scrubbing process has allowed us to divert essential labor to other tasks. For example, we have been able to provide increased glass and handrail cleaning thanks to the automation of our floor scrubbing deliverable.”

Avidbots Command Center: How success is measured

Avidbots Command Center, Neo’s web-based portal for monitoring, managing and measuring cleaning performance, opened new avenues for Cirka’s operators. They could now reliably and precisely track Neo’s cleaning activity across the entire retail complex. This represents a notable change from their previous routine, where recording and evaluating cleaning status relied only on human reporting.

These new insights allowed Cirka to manage floor care at Myer Centre with foresight, embedding consistency, reliability and accountability into every cleaning action they took. The transformation speaks for itself.

Averaging a productivity rate of 1,350 square meters per hour across this dynamic space, Neo’s on track to clean more than 85% of the cleanable floor space!

 


Daily cleaning report provided via Avidbots Command Center

 

These metrics assisted Cirka in delivering world-class cleaning services to their valued client. For Dmytrenko, Avidbots Command Center is a game changer.

“Command Center has provided a depth of transparency and accountability that we haven’t had before,” explains Dmytrenko. “It has also become an important management tool for our team, as we can check cleaning routes against QA scores and make tweaks to ensure Neo and our teams are being used in the most efficient way.”

Cirka and Neo: The future is bright and shiny

Neo has a new best friend at Cirka. Their experiences using Neo at Myer Centre demonstrated the value of intelligent automation and how cleaning robots help conquer today’s cleaning obstacles while setting up scalable success for the future.

But cleanliness levels aren’t the only thing flying high these days. Neo has enabled custodial crews to work more effectively, as well as evolving their approach to floor care and facility cleanliness moving forward. Neo has made them believers in what autonomous floor scrubbing robots can help them achieve.

“Neo is autonomous, but it does require buy-in from the entire site operating team to unlock its potential,” states Dmytrenko. “There is a learning curve and Cirka has been lucky that our site operations team have been excited by the addition of Neo and have worked closely with the Avidbots team to unlock the best results.”

Transform your facility’s cleanliness with Neo

If you’re interested in achieving the same cleaning outcomes that Cirka experienced at Myer Centre, please contact us to learn more.

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