Inventory Management: Avoiding Costly Mistakes

This FacilitiesNet article targets key questions that need to be asked when evaluating the efficiency of your inventory management. Keeping an eye on these seemingly minimal details will save you cost, labor and time in the long run. 

JvL, Flickr.com

Maintenance and engineering departments rely on a readily available supply of spare parts and equipment to carry out their daily duties. The goal of managers is to deliver a reliable supply of these products using a cost-effective inventory management strategy.

Unfortunately, poor inventory management practices and systems end up costing departments and organizations dearly. By examining common mistakes in key areas of inventory management — including storage equipment, the role of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), and storeroom organization and supervision — managers can avoid costly missteps in this challenging process.

Key Questions
An effective inventory-management system ensures both parts availability and low cost. An operational assessment can reduce inventory costs 20 percent. This assessment is a useful tool for identifying the current status versus the optimum situation and developing an improvement plan. An operational assessment can provide answers to these questions:

To read the full article, click here. 

Contractors' Role In Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Sky Pro practices green cleaning because we know it can help both the environment AND the bottom line. Read this CleanLink.com article and see how the cleaning industry has such a large impact on health and the environment.

Cheryl, Flickr.com

There is no doubt that green cleaning has become a part of our industry, especially in certain building segments and parts of the country. Years ago it was an optional program offered at a premium price to increase profit margins. But today it is often an expected method of doing business and is increasingly being required by customers, especially as the cost of green products continues to move toward cost neutrality compared to their traditional counterparts.

While many contractors care deeply about environmental issues, others do green cleaning for pragmatic business reasons. Candidly, I got over the moralizing and "doing it for the right reason" a long time ago and am just delighted that companies are using greener products, focusing on conserving chemicals and other products, training their workers better, and seeking methods to reduce the use of energy and water even when it is supplied by their customers. Regardless of "why" a company does these things, they result in reduced negative impacts on both health and the environment, and they're good for business.

To continue reading this article on green cleaning, click here.

The Evolution Of Chemical-free Cleaning

Sky Pro has always valued clean, pure, chemical free water and prides themselves in using this water in their window cleaning. Over time, the world of chemical-free cleaning has evolved and grown into what we see in the market today. This Cleaning and Maintenance Management article describes new options, a safer industry and the new generation that is arising, as well as proof that it works and taking the next step towards this way of cleaning. 

Geir Tonnessen, Flickr.com

Over the past several years, green cleaning products have become increasingly less toxic while delivering comparable results to their traditional counterparts.

This, in part, is due to the emerging science of using plant, bio-based and simple tap water formulations that target soils and harmful bacteria instead of eradicating large swaths of microorganisms.

We are slowly realizing that nature can also provide us with some of what we need to safely and effectively clean surfaces without the use of toxic substances.

Taking the notion of environmentally preferable cleaning a step further, some companies have developed non-toxic, chemical-free innovations.

This industry has begun to explore this idea of less harmful cleaning strategies, including completely non-toxic, chemical-free substitutes and technologies that use no chemicals — natural or otherwise — to achieve more effective cleaning results.

We are evolving beyond green to extreme green to chemical-free cleaning.

New Options
Things like electrolyzed water, which separates tap water into positive and negative streams that attract soils and render harmful bacteria inert, have emerged as the new go-to solutions.

Other cosmopolitan, chemical-free technologies like steam vapor and ultraviolet light have begun to emerge as viable solutions to clean sensitive environments such as hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

A recent literature review entitled “Control of the Environment,” which focused on steam vapor as a chemical-free disinfectant, concluded that steam cleaning is effective for periodic deep cleaning of hospital environments.


To read the full article, click here.

28th Street Apartments | Notes of Interest

It's National Architecture Week! This American Institute of Architects article takes a look at one person's unconventional decision to restore an old building to meet todays modern demands. Located in a neighborhood with historic homes, Koning Eizenberg’s design for 28th Street Apartments successfully restored this former YMCA building, which now houses two nonprofits.

Andy Smith, Flickr.com

The 28th St Apartments restores and adds to a distressed historic building (a former YMCA) in south Los Angeles. The project now houses two synergistic programs run by two nonprofits who co-purchased the building: The neighborhood youth training and employment program is housed in 8,000sf of the historic activity spaces and 49 units of supportive housing (serving youth exiting foster care, the mentally ill and the chronically homeless) occupies the remaining space. Supportive services are offered on site and residents have access to a roof garden, laundry and lounge.

The owners developed the program and relied on us to create a setting that both supported informal social interaction to build community and accommodated the privacy and security needed for the two separate but synergistic uses to operate effectively. Together we reached out to the community to gauge interest in the neighborhood programs, expectations for the restoration and identification of neighborhood needs through a series of noticed meetings and focus groups including the family of the building’s well known architect- Paul R Williams. Bringing the building back to life and respecting the historic legacy was key to community acceptance.

The building is on a limited 17,214sf urban site of cultural significance. The context is a chronically underserved neighborhood with a demographic that has shifted from predominantly African American to Hispanic. The historic front entry of the structure forms a neighborhood porch where community kids gather and ice cream trucks pass while the new addition creates a less formal side entry to the housing units above. The existing historic building spawned an efficient urban strategy on a small vacant sliver of land on the back of the building to add square footage for new updated unit types while not triggering costly parking. The project demonstrates that it is possible to provide community amenity, and achieve good innovative architectural design compatible within the context of an historic building in a neighborhood of historic homes and streets.

To view this article online, click here.

Reducing Cleaning Tasks Can Actually Increase The Time

Whether it's due to budget cuts or just begin plan lazy, sometimes we clean less frequently than we should. But according to this article from CleanLink.com , this can actually cause us to exert more effort, time and money due to previous buildup. They found that cleaning more frequently as opposed to less often can actually maintain better results.

Sam, Flickr.com

Most of us have encountered situations where cleaning task frequencies have been reduced to reflect budget cuts. This can be a difficult time for the Building Service Contractor since the customer needs to understand the relationship between tasks, frequencies, expectations and time standards.

Change in frequency can impact time standards. The usual rule of thumb is that the less often a task is performed the longer it takes per visit. This principle applies primarily to tasks considered “daily” (5 x week) such as trash removal, dusting, vacuuming, sweeping/mopping and restroom cleaning.

For example: if it takes 30 minutes per 1,000 square feet to perform a task daily (250 x year) it can take longer to perform the same task to the same standards (such as 1 x week or 52 x year). When services are reduced to 1 x week (52 x year), more detail work must be performed at the same visit thereby usually taking longer.

To read more about cleaning frequency, click here.