How Janitorial Management Software Can Help You Deliver on Cleaning Contracts
Your technology should work with you to improve your janitorial service delivery through easily managed work scheduling software.
Janitorial contractors like you face the challenge of knowing your distributed teams of cleaners are on site and delivering upon the client’s contracted services. It’s a complicated part of your business. A single contract could have hundreds of tasks or requirements that specify what areas or zones need to be cleaned and at what frequency. Plus, tracking and verifying all necessary requirements outlined in your contracts can be highly manual and involve lots of paper and spreadsheets.
But it doesn’t have to. Delivering quality service to your customers can be easily managed with an industry-specific technology that allows you to schedule any kind of activity by specific date, time since last completed or by interval (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) and controlled by location.
Here are two things to look for when researching work scheduling software for your business.
Scheduling by Locations
Tracking contract obligations gets complicated because those requirements can vary broadly by job, location or area. Look for a software that allows you to set up proactive schedules at a location, zone or checkpoint level. The activities required can be verified and reported by user’s GPS activity or with more granular tracking methods like QR codes, NFC tags or Bluetooth beacons.
Scheduled work management through your software increases compliance and provides proof of service. Managers and end-customers can view reporting on visits and task completion at an area level to verify proof of service. And if the scheduled visits or tasks are overdue, exception alerts can be sent to your managers to address immediately before it becomes a bigger issue. Together, scheduling and alerts can help drive accountability by overseeing janitorial service levels and managing slip and fall liability.
Scheduling by Loops or Intervals
Most cleaning visits and tasks are pretty repetitive. Requirements from day to day or week to week tend to look pretty similar. So, setting schedules every day isn’t efficient or practical. To save you the administrative hassle, look for a software that allows you to schedule activities on a recurring basis. Good work scheduling software allows you to set time intervals on which activities need to be completed — on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis — and automate the tracking of these on a recurring basis.
Additionally, loop scheduling can be a powerful way to protect against risk. Instead of tracking when the interval work should be completed, you can specify the maximum amount of time between work activities. If the maximum “loop” is exceeded, a cleaner receives an alert notifying them to the requirement. This helps to ensure that too much time does not pass between visits, inspections or even training refreshers.
Missed Work Alerts
Speaking of alerts, if a scheduled task or audit is overdue or missed and the software system does not record an event in the time allotted, an exception notification should be automatically raised. The exception should stay open until the cleaner triggers a GPS event or signal scan or fills out and submits the task or audit form.
Look for janitorial software with mobile support that also allows users to view activity exceptions or receive push notifications. Managers should also be able to view reporting on all open and closed exceptions through a web portal and conduct analysis on locations, zones and activity types that are driving the exceptions.
Work scheduling has the potential to help janitorial contractors like you win more business and manage your field workforce more efficiently. You can provide your customers with the proof of service they demand (and deserve) but also have the confidence that your internal processes are in place to proactively identify and resolve issues before they become failures. Plus, it can save you the administrative headache of tracking your contract obligations and provide powerful reporting to help identify problem areas and focus your resources.