6 Reasons Your Cleaning Company Needs Process Automation

6 Reasons Your Cleaning Company Needs Process Automation

You’ve heard talk of ‘automating processes’ for years now… but you’ve just been too busy to invest your valuable time into researching why it’s necessary and how it might benefit your cleaning company. We get it. It can be difficult to determine what’s actually worth pausing for.

However, we believe that your next few moments will be time well spent, as you just may discover that process automation, once implemented, will certainly return those minutes – and significantly more! – back to you.

The Value of Process Automation

1. Strength in Stability

Process automation allows you to create and maintain consistently positive experiences with your brand every time customers interface with your business. For example, if a customer needs to submit a work order, they can do it the same way every time, and see when it has been assigned to a team member to complete. If a client needs to make a comment on the quality of work being performed by the nighttime cleaners, there’s a clear path for reaching the right person during the appropriate window of time. If you want to place a bid for a new customer, you can do so in a clean, professional way that exhibits a level of quality that gives your business a competitive edge.

Process automation ensures that once you set up a system, it stays the same, until you choose to change it! This consistency provides stability and lets you establish (and fulfill!) the high expectations that your customers have of your business.

2. Put Your Hands to Work Elsewhere

Manual tasks take time. Time is money. You spend hours at a time trying to create appropriate work schedules, keeping track of all the inspection reports, tracking time and avoiding overtime hours accumulated, watching supply levels for reordering, accepting and assigning work orders, communicating with customers, training (and retraining!) new employees on tasks… the list could go on for hours… but that would take even more of the time that you simply don’t have!

Efficiency, by definition, involves the extent to which time, effort, and cost are effectively applied to accomplish intended tasks and purposes. By utilizing a software system that automates the production of reports, tracks information, and provides reminders of upcoming items of importance, this process automation frees up tens of hours each week that would’ve otherwise been spent on inefficient expenditures of your time, effort and cost. Process automation allows you to get more done in the same amount of time, thereby significantly improving your productivity and allowing you to tend to other important tasks!

3. Support Sustainable Growth

Can you think of a time when you made a certain process work, “for now,” intending to revisit it and improve it later? Did you ever go back to it? Did that temporary fix hold up for very long? Were you able to replicate that fix when another customer had a similar problem? Or are you juggling multiple, different, “temporary” manual processes across the board?

If you’re intending to grow your business, you’ll need to be confident that the processes you’re utilizing are correct and fully scalable, no matter how large your business grows and at what rate you grow.

Process automation takes the information you give it, automatically runs it through a consistent set of predetermined actions and gives you the same (accurate!) results every time you need them. So, whether you’re working with 15 clients or 500 clients, you can utilize the janitorial inspection software to set yourself up for success through scalability.

4. Quality performance = Happier customers

Likely, your managers perform inspections on the work completed by your cleaners. But approximately what percent of those paper performance checklists do you inspect each week?

Inspections reports should be regularly utilized to catch mistakes and omissions before your customers discover them first. However, inspections reports should not be viewed as one-and-done information resources! Overall summaries of these reports should also be studied in order to recognize emerging patterns and trends. This can be a tedious task to manually complete, and to do it consistently, requires hours of time!

By automating inspections reports via janitorial management software, you are automatically and instantly given a birds’ eye view of what your team members are doing well, and what they’re doing poorly. Customized checklists that have been customized for each customer, ensure that inspections – no matter who is doing them – will be measured based on identical standards and expectations. The outcome? Reliable, measureable, actionable results that you can use as a baseline for training your employees and protecting the quality of your brand reputation with customers.

5. Avoid Errors to Gain Respect

The risk of making major errors while juggling your daily, manual tasks is ridiculously high. Through automation, processes are clearly defined and can be expertly and accurately completed every time. This use of technology significantly reduces the number of errors and oversights throughout your business, which results in higher service levels and quality.

Your business must maintain accuracy and precision in all efforts to cultivate a sense of loyalty and pride in your employees and in your customers, and to keep a certain competitive edge in the industry. When the services of an organization are consistently seen to be quality and trustworthy, the organization will be viewed in the same way.

6. Budgeting Your Bottom Line

Your commercial cleaning business cannot be profitable unless you find ways to reduce operational costs and expenses. Some owners feel that the best way to protect their bottom line is to keep investments in technology low. They keep on using paper and pencil processes, believing that in so doing, they are saving money.

This could not be further from the truth!

Today’s process automation software is very affordable and, over time, repays you the investment in time saved, metric visibility, inefficiencies discovered, reduced errors, and streamlined efforts. The adjustments that automation offers distill your operational performance into the most optimized procedures to save you money and time!

Mastering the End Game

While process automation supports an extensive list of benefits to your business, the act of automation, in and of itself, isn’t the goal. The end game of process automation is the intelligence and accuracy that it provides for your business to achieve efficient actions, obtain meaningful insights, and drive increased value.

Process automation improves your cleaning business’s ability to quickly respond to customers, effectively engage with employees, and to increase your competitive leverage.

Learn more abut the real benefits of business process automation for your cleaning company, by connecting with the specialists at Janitorial Manager. Schedule a brief FREE DEMO of our software, and see how much time and money you could save, today!