“Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking we can get on with creating the future.”
— James Bertrand
When it comes to cost-cutting and saving, the trickiest part is to measure efficiency. Take your largest expenditures over a period of time (36, 60 month) then take into account your capital equipment and consumables expenses and long term cost, debts and savings. From energy usage, labor, materials, and equipment. But if you can look for hidden value in existing innovations — even the simplest transformation can provide ways to cut cost. These key things you need to keep in mind when selecting new ways of operating your business towards cost efficiency:
Use Eco-Friendly Equipment
Every eco-smart equipment would advocate for less energy and less chemicals. The less you use them, the more money you can save, the more your business is efficient. Electricity, gas, fuel — cutting these renewable resources will also help to cut carbon dioxide and greenhouse emissions. Take example of cordless equipment with renewable energy that will surely save time, effort, energy, and increase efficiency.
Ensure the good eco-friendly product must substantially reduce waste or environmental footprint compared with traditional method. It should also include green cleaning agents, low water usage, as well as the use of microfiber, a reusable cloth that replace wasteful paper towels that required cutting of trees and waste disposal.
Control Workforce Expenses
Many of accommodation businesses would spend money on hiring many low-paid workforces, and end up having big spending on wages. The fear of adapting automations may still exist within conservative businesses, however, this is the time we think about cost efficiency. Automated floor cleaners should have been able to fill the void – while these robots can automatically clean areas by themselves, cleaners may find time to focus on other value-added tasks. The more you automate, the more possibility for you to save time, and time is money. Instead of paying 500$ for 5 cleaner in one day that takes 5 hours of cleaning with no visible result, you can instead invest a few dollars a day on better equipment that will enable less cleaner more task.
Control Spending
In every business, there is always a way to find about 10-20% spending that has not been managed closely. In the cleaning department for example, you can find enormous amount of spending on chemical uses and other unnecessary supplies. Reducing these excessive inventory will help you not only to reduce waste and spoilage but also to encourage your staff to improve their skills in managing resources in hand.
Improve Management
According to a study, most of the housekeeping inefficiency happened within the job workflow system. Housekeepers would spend 10-20% of their time trying to find the next room to clean. With all the recent technologies and project management tools around the market, we should have been able to find the right solution that will help productivity and efficiency. Throw away walkie-talkies – maid should have been able to communicate and find out their next task quickly through smartphones.
On another note, you also need to ensure that time is not wasted for idle activities. Save money by flexible scheduling that allows everyone to be more efficient, such as doing the other important job while the main activity is low.
Don’t Underspend
Perhaps your ready to innovate however, you and your directors are not willing to spend on technology. Cost-reducing in cleaning is not solely about budget spending, but also about valuing sustainability and quality of your cleaning supplies and equipment. Think of longer term impact: if purchasing a machine at $8 a day could save time in cleaning up to an hour as much as it could save labor expenses, how much can you actually save in one year? What is the hourly cost of your labour?
Educate Your Staffs On Your Effort
One of the very crucial part of your new objective is to ensure that all staffs are alert, well-informed and well-aware of your effort. There is nothing worse within innovations than bad communications, bad awareness, and lack of understanding within the system. Spend extra time to ensure everyone fully understand your cost-saving objective and know what the staffs can do to help.