Case study · Commercial cleaning
Sixty cleaners, and a diary that never stops moving.
A commercial cleaning company working for national house builders came to us running the whole operation on spreadsheets and phone calls. They now run contracts, scheduling, crew transport and invoicing in one place.
The problem
Cleaning a building site is not cleaning an office.
An office gets cleaned to a standing rota. A new housing development does not. The work happens on a live site, plot by plot, against a builder's handover date, and that date moves.
With sixty staff and a subcontractor network spread across four regions, every change meant someone rebuilding a week's schedule by hand and ringing round to tell people. Crews had to be matched to the right qualifications, checked against booked leave, and then physically got to site, which for a business running shared transport is a second scheduling problem sitting underneath the first.
Off-the-shelf field service tools handle the first problem. None of them handle the second.
What we built
One system for the office, one app for the field.
Contracts and quoting
Sites break down into plots, and pricing is held against the service and the plot type, not negotiated each time. Agreed increases apply themselves on the date they are due.
Scheduling, including transport
The scheduler places crews against qualifications, availability and leave, then groups them into vehicles with collection and drop-off points and routes the journey. One answer, not two.
A mobile app for cleaners
Crews see the day's work, complete jobs on site and capture what they need as they go, including access records, health and safety and sign-off.
Finished work flows into their accounting system instead of being retyped, and complaints and customer feedback are held against the visit they relate to, so a pattern on one site is visible instead of anecdotal.
What changed
The schedule survives the phone call.
A builder moving a handover date used to cost most of an afternoon. It is now a change in one place, with the transport worked out alongside it.
Growth stopped being a staffing problem for the office. The business has expanded its regional coverage without the back office growing at the same rate, because the work that scaled was the part the system took over.
The system has been running and developing for years, and still is. That is the point of building instead of buying: it changes when the business does.
Where to go next
Running an operation on spreadsheets?
Tell us where it hurts.
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