According to a recent Facility Cleaning Decision magazine survey, cleaning service respondents reported being responsible for cleaning an average of 34 buildings each, which equaled almost 1,291,860 square feet of space. They also reported that they bought approximately a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of supplies each year!
This means that your hefty investment in cleaning supplies constitutes a substantial portion of your expenses every year. When you struggle to account for your supply usage, then you may soon find your business struggling as well.
Why Is Supply Tracking So Important?
Losing track of your supplies is easy! They can stolen, misplaced, mislabeled, misused, horded or lost. This is why an effective supply tracking system plays such a key role in helping you stay aware of the movements of your most important tangible assets.
However, all too often, supply tracking is one of the first areas where complacency can creep in. Failure to keep your finger on the pulse of your inventory usage can become a far-reaching and expensive issue. It can impact the quality of your customer service, create waste and add significant cost, negatively impacting your bottom line.
4 Ways Effective Supply Tracking Makes Sense (and dollars!)
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Happy Customers Are Loyal Customers
How do you make customers happy? Provide what you promised when you promised it, and then go above and beyond! It’s tough to provide cleaning services if you your cleaners don’t have the equipment and supplies they need to do the job. How do you know what supplies they have or don’t have? Are they using the correct chemicals? Are they over mixing? Over diluting? Are they cleaning everything with glass cleaner? Are you spending too much in supplies or not enough to ensure the quality you promised? Tracking supply consumption is one important step toward developing happy, loyal customers!
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Extraneous Costs Are Reduced
Being able to implement strategic plans for supply orders helps to reduce unnecessary purchases and freight costs related to expensive expedited deliveries of supplies. In addition, if you are unaware of what supplies you already have in stock, you are far more likely to order new inventory to meet client demands, only to find the original inventory later. This can become costly, especially if the excess goods are never used.
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Training Errors Are Caught Quicker
Proper supply tracking provides an opportunity to track the movement of the product from your shelve to each customer supply closet and can provide insights into errors and issues before they create long-term, expensive problems. For instance, say one of your clients requires that your crew use a concentrated – and high priced – floor solution that must be mixed. In looking over a couple months’ worth of real-time usage and supply tracking data, you notice that you are having to reorder this expensive chemical twice as often as you’d initially anticipated and budgeted for. Your records also show that one individual crew member had been consistently responsible for using this product. This knowledge then allows you to ask the specific questions necessary to discover that that individual had been utilizing an incorrect ratio of mixing that overused the expensive concentrate. Rather than continuing to purchase excessive amounts of the concentrate to be improperly used, you are instead able to quickly retrain the employee on proper mixing procedures, and the problem is instantly solved. That real-time, hard data just saved you thousands of dollars over a year’s time.
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Future Planning is Easier and More Accurate
Accurate supply tracking provides you with the data you need to help you make key decisions and future plans for your business, including:
- Whether you can take on additional client requests or particular new projects with the inventory you already have on hand.
- When you will need to order new items and how much each order will be.
- Identifying inventory trends over periods of time and making educated predictions regarding speed of supply usage.
- Planning for large restocking expenditures throughout the year.
- And more!
Do You Have What You Need to Succeed?
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I know I need help in this area, but I just don’t have time to sit down with a pen and paper and work through everything,” we can help! Contact us at Janitorial Manager for a FREE DEMO of our commercial cleaning software that is tailored to provide you with the tools you need to successfully save (and make!) more money this year.