Your hard floor looks clean, but is it really clean? How do you know? Are you still using paper or self-reported logs and infrequent spot-checks? Or can you demonstrate that your cleaning standards are consistently being met?
The quality and consistency of cleanliness is a trust factor that can make the difference between success and failure of your operation. Consider guests in a hotel lobby or residents at a senior living community or multi-family building. Or passengers traveling through an airport concourse. How do you know that your facility is meeting its standard operating procedures (SOPs)? How much reputational (and therefore commercial) risk arises when the quality and consistency of floor care drops below your expected standard?
Dirt Erodes Trust: It Is the First Thing People See
When residents or guests no longer give you their business because their expectation of clean doesn’t match your delivery, there may be no early warning. You may also lose prospective residents or guests who have not yet experienced your property.
According to Ecolab1, one in four travelers chose a hotel based on reviews. Online reviews and word of mouth can also play an important role in decisions about longer-term stays, whether for residents considering senior living communities or families planning to move into multi-family housing. In addition, 73%2 of grocery shoppers prefer to shop in a neat, clean store. In most businesses, cleanliness isn't just important — it's inseparable from the brand itself. When a location is dirty, word spreads, ratings fall, and future revenue is at risk. Employees may leave too.
Changing the Outcome Means Changing the Operating Model
It’s virtually impossible to have a floor surface that is always clean. However, a consistently executed process with defined outcomes supported by data will get the closest to meeting and even exceeding the standards set by your SOP.
Autonomous floor scrubbing technology is proven and available with many options, including faster drying. However, it is not as simple as purchasing a robot. Buying a robot is a technology decision. Building an autonomous cleaning program is an operating-model decision.
If you want a program that consistently performs, achieves your SOP goals, and scales to grow with your operation, you need a Physical AI Orchestrator that is also a trusted partner that can work with you to:
- Understand your operating model.
- Design a change management program with you.
- Deploy a scalable program that meets defined goals and can grow with you.
- Measure ongoing performance.
- Optimize the design and operating approach.
- Scale the program to deliver defined outcomes and durable business value.
Dirty Water: Evidence It’s Working
One test performed as part of SoftBank Robotics America’s floor care onboarding program is the use of an autonomous floor scrubber to clean a portion of the floor and measure the results. It is obvious the scrubber will clean the floor. Less obvious is that the degree of dirty water left after scrubbing the floor is seen as an indicator of existing SOP compliance.
The dirtier the water at the outset, the lower the quality of SOP compliance. What comes back in the recovery tank can expose a gap between the SOP you think is being followed and the cleaning actually being delivered. Recovered water may contain dust, mold spores, pollen, plant and insect parts, cleaning chemicals, bacteria, rodent waste, toxic byproducts of produced lead from cigarette smoke, and other contaminants found on the floor — all of which may affect your immune system, damage your nervous system, and cause other health issues3.
So-called “clean” floors get exposed during this test. The question for you is whether the result is a one-time exception or an indicator that your SOPs are not being executed as consistently and effectively as you expect.
Using Data as Proof of Clean
With the right autonomous program, you can validate cleanliness and observe changes in your operating environment. SoftBank Robotics America’s adoption program focuses on embedding automation as a natural part of the SOPs and includes employee involvement and training, internal and external communications, top-down led change management, site readiness checks, and a focus on maximizing utilization and service uptime.
Every robot in the autonomous floor-scrubbing program collects performance data. These data enable you and your operations teams to understand what was cleaned, where, for how long, and whether there were any exceptions to the expected program. Having data is one thing; knowing how to interpret it and act on it is another. This is why selecting an experienced partner, well-versed in automation and cleaning, is important.
Armed with reliable information and with expert guidance, you can make better resource decisions and be confident that your SOPs are being executed as planned, which has a positive impact on customer4 experience and employee morale. For locations such as senior living that require continuous cleaning or cleaning multiple times per day, an autonomous program is essential. For an airport with high foot traffic that requires continuous rotational shifts, an autonomous floor care program is also an important productivity tool for janitorial teams.
The key to better outcomes is having the right program in place, consistently executed, which should result in the amount of dirt in the water diminishing over time. The goal is a floor that is both visually clean and proven to be clean, supported by data, which demonstrates the health of the SOP.
The question then becomes one of scale. How do you achieve the same high-quality, consistent clean at other locations? And how do you verify consistent quality of clean – at scale?
Scaling Across Multiple Sites
In a multi-site operation, the SOP must be executed consistently across every site, according to the requirements of the site. There may not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. This is where an experienced partner can work with you to help scale the program, adapt it to the unique requirements of each location, and maintain a focus on service uptime.
Service uptime is a critical reason why some robotics programs scale while others stall after the initial project. Maintaining uptime requires full performance visibility, management by exception, ongoing optimization of the cleaning program, and clear accountability.
At one location, it’s relatively easy to manually make the necessary inspections to ensure quality standards are being met. At 20 or 200+ locations, there needs to be a better mechanism for managing the operation. This is where centralized orchestration becomes essential. Read more about how one customer scaled their operation to over 200 robots across 25 sites.
As a trusted partner, SoftBank Robotics America works with customers to understand their full operational model and the outcomes required for each location. Service uptime is critical to meeting SOPs. If a robot malfunctions and needs service or repair, SoftBank Robotics America assesses the situation and, if necessary, deploys a swap robot as soon as possible. This approach avoids relying solely on a technician visit, ordering parts and repair — a process which could take anywhere from two to ten days or more.
Centralized orchestration of the operation is key to scaling and is made possible with SoftBank Robotics Connect. This enterprise-scale platform provides visibility into the data collected from deployed robots and enables your support team and/or the SoftBank Robotics America customer support team (who are on hand post-deployment) to identify areas for optimization across the operation. SoftBank Robotics Connect allows you to monitor multiple types of robots, from multiple manufacturers through one portal dashboard, enabling your teams to focus on exceptions, outliers, and other areas for improvement.
Orchestration: Enables Adoption and an Operating Model That Scales
A Physical AI orchestrator partners with you and focuses on adoption of a custom solution that meets the business outcomes required and builds the muscle, with you, for an automation foundation that scales beyond the initial project to deliver durable business value.
The robot technology selected should be the right one for the task, and your operating model processes should be well understood and adapted in alignment with the team responsible for execution. The data collected should enable facilities and operations leaders to optimize and scale performance. The potential benefits are material: higher quality cleaning, more consistent execution of SOPs, increased productivity, labor optimization, safer operations, faster drying time, reduced cross-contamination, improved service uptime, and an improved customer experience. Read more about how one customer values the impact of quality clean and how cleanliness demonstrates a commitment to customer care.
Visual inspection of floors becomes less important as the sole means of determining what is happening in a space when robots can provide tangible proof that SOPs have been completed. Dirty water may be the first indication of SOP compliance but, over time, robot-generated data can be used as the evidence of SOP completion.
To realize the benefits of autonomous cleaning, your question should never be, ‘what robot do I buy?’ but rather, ‘which Physical AI orchestrator can help me to adopt and scale an autonomous program that delivers on my required outcomes?’
Learn more about what to look for when evaluating autonomous cleaning programs, learn from successful customers, and learn more about SoftBank Robotics America.
