Correspondent Tom Crockford brings news of research from Denmark.
Municipalities and health authorities everywhere are trying to achieve the seemingly impossible, notably to raise cleaning standards while at the same time lowering costs. The need to up the fight against hospital bacteria like MRSA, for example, with a shrinking budget to work from has become a nightmare.
Which is why my attention was drawn to a scientific paper by two researchers, Kim Normann Andersen and Rony Medaglia, from the Centre for Applied ICT at the Copenhagen Business School. They have published a study on robotic vacuum cleaning and in particular its potential for public sector labour cost savings. The paper documents the impact of using robot vacuum cleaners on quality and labour costs, and provides valuable data on plusses and minuses.
In Denmark where the study was carried out, approximately €134 million is spent on cleaning the country’s hospitals per year. Obviously this includes more than merely vacuum cleaning, but the authors estimate that some 1,400 to 1,500 jobs are devoted to vacuuming tasks - a considerable amount of time and money.
The study attempts to analyse the drivers and barriers in adapting the use of robot vacuum cleaning in different areas. For example in office environments where there are fairly large uniform floor surfaces, there is considerable potential for using robots. The possibility of theft, the absence of monitoring, night time crash problems and technical challenges are, however, seen as possible barriers. Similarly, in hospitals the need for constant optimisation of work routines is seen as a driving force, while a barrier could be the fact that quality cleaning standards are essential in healthcare environments.
All in all, the cases for and against utilising robots are fairly obvious. Large, uncluttered surfaces lend themselves to it, while areas with litter to be picked up and where there are physical obstacles to overcome, do not. In terms of cleaning quality, the possibility to increase the frequency of cleaning is a plus, while the inability to clean into corners is a minus.
The bottom line is that there is a definite potential for significant cost savings.
In the case of Danish government offices, the study estimates that some 1,680 hours per year are spent on vacuuming each facility once a week for 48 weeks in the year. Using robots, the number of man hours could be reduced to somewhere between 350 and 570 per year. Of course there is a need for further technical adjustments and development of the robots in areas such as noise levels, the tendency to suck rugs into the vacuum cleaner, and the necessity to manually prepare the area.
The conclusion of the study is that there should be far more active pursuit in adopting the use of robots in cleaning. The tendency to leave this to the long-term market competition, ie, the large cleaning service companies, to introduce the use of robots is seen as wasting an opportunity for the public sector to make significant cost savings in cleaning budgets.
For details: www.cbs.dk/caict
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