Industrial Scrubbers and Sweepers – Clearing the Way to Optimal Facility Operations
Being in the industrial equipment business, we really appreciate a clean floor. That is to say, we know firsthand just how much careful effort and specialized equipment it takes to make an industrial or commercial floor really shine. Speaking of specialized equipment, modern industrial floor scrubbing and sweeping equipment is quickly becoming the default solution for all but the smallest floor areas, given how affordable and easy-to-operate this equipment has become. Even still, some customers fall just short of justifying an investment into a scrubber or sweeper, so we’d like to help connect the dots between this equipment and safe, efficient, cost-effective facility operations.
Let’s start by briefly defining what each of these equipment pieces entail:
- Industrial Scrubbers – industrial scrubbing equipment is designed to remove aggressive wet and dry soils from large building floor areas, including heavy dirt, particulates, films, and spilled fluids. To clean these types of soils from floors, scrubbers use heavy-duty buffing pads that are mechanically forced against floor surfaces to oscillate away unwanted debris. Scrubbers can even complete all-in-one cleaning through options such as adding hot and cold water, chemical dosing, and vacuum collection.
- Industrial Sweepers – industrial sweeping equipment performs a lighter-duty but equally important cleaning process for environments with dry, dusty, lightly soiled floors only. To do so, industrial sweepers use dry sweeping brushes and vacuum suction to physically dislodge and collect particulates as they go. Sweepers can also be outfitted with optional features such as high-volume vacuum bins, dust control misting bars, and many styles of brushes.
Both floor scrubbers and sweepers are offered in multiple styles. Every style from ride-on, stand-on, walk-behind, and even fully automated styles as well are available. In addition, most units are battery powered just like a rechargeable forklift, but there are options for internal combustion units specifically designed for heavy-duty outdoor applications (like parking lots and industrial yards).
How Scrubbing and Sweeping Equipment Benefits Industrial Facility Maintenance
Next, let’s review the main ways that scrubbing and sweeping equipment benefits facility maintenance objectives:
- Safety – above all else, keeping floors clean promotes high levels of personnel and vehicular safety, eliminating risk factors associated with slips, trips, falls, and loss of vehicle traction.
- Labor Efficiency – industrial scrubbers and sweepers drastically speed up floor cleaning time compared to manual methods, making cleaning labor much more efficient. These cleaners also speed up normal staff labor by reducing concerns about hazardous floor conditions.
- Environmental Health – floor cleaners can directly mitigate environmental workplace hazards known to cause employee health issues such as by cleaning up floor debris before it gets airborne, limiting cleaning chemical exposure, reducing ergonomic strain of manual cleaning, and disinfecting pathogens.
- Employee Satisfaction – not only do employees working in a clean environment naturally perform better due to higher job satisfaction, but even better, cleaning staff reach even higher levels of job satisfaction as modern cleaning technology makes their direct jobs easier while also improving their work environment.
- Product Quality – floor scrubbers and sweepers cut down free-moving debris that could otherwise end up contaminating products and packages, which is especially concerning around sensitive materials such as food products. End users will often view any amount of debris as degrading to product quality.
- Cost Reduction – in all the above ways and more, floor scrubbers and sweepers help businesses lower net operating costs and improve facility maintenance practices by treating floor soils right at the source. In addition, the above benefits directly correlate to corporate risk-based cost reduction, as we’ll discuss next.
Managing Risk with Floor Cleaning Equipment Across Various Industries
Another way to make the case for a floor cleaning equipment investment is to analyze the risk factors that floor scrubbers and sweepers mitigate. At a high level, we find it useful to group risk factors by the common industries below, as these can be easily grafted onto adjacent industries should yours not be listed. All in all, risk factors can be translated into cost savings or cost avoidance, giving you another practical way to justify floor cleaning equipment.
- Transportation – transportation hubs such as airports, train stations, and subway stations are 24/7 operations with some exposure to the elements, which require fast, single-pass floor cleaning equipment to reduce the risk of passenger injuries and delayed schedules.
- Medical Facilities – medical environments deal with unique risks associated with biological and pathogenic contamination, requiring hygienic-grade floor cleaning equipment using sterilizing chemicals to ensure patient safety.
- Warehouses – keeping material handling environment floors clean not only reduces the risk of ergonomic hazards, but also defends against product returns and reputational damage should debris find its way onto stored products.
- Manufacturing – while there are many subsets of the manufacturing industry, all domains require some level of floor cleaning to keep their businesses operating smoothly. In specific domains such as food, pharma, and consumer goods manufacturing, ample floor cleaning is required to pass third-party and regulatory audits.
- Retail – as the saying goes, “retail is detail”, and cleanliness is certainly one of the primary details in question. Floor scrubbers and sweepers enhance retail environments in critical ways, managing customer perception risks down to tiny details such as the smooth, firm “feel” of walking across a clean floor.
- Public Centers – public gathering and thoroughfare centers share many risk factors with all of the above industries, with added concerns regarding environmental contamination (such as large spills running into stormwater drains) and surface finish protection that extends floor life (such as buffing plaza marble).