Optimize restroom cleaning schedules and improve cost efficiency in high-traffic venues with the Kimberly-Clark Professional Onvation^® smart restroom IoT system.

For high-traffic facilities, restrooms are an often-overlooked but critical touchpoint for guest satisfaction. Given the tremendous impact that restrooms can have on a building’s reputation, there is a lot of pressure weighing on the shoulders of facility managers. With today’s widespread access to always-on connectivity and the evolution of IoT technology, now is a great time for facility management teams to re-think their janitorial workflow and improve their hygiene management.

Doing the “same old, same old” is inefficient and costly 

For years, high-traffic facilities have used traditional, labor-intensive practices to monitor, manage and perform restroom maintenance. Having facility management team members visit each individual restroom on a fixed schedule to check on product levels and hygiene conditions is a costly and inflexible approach. This is especially true for large, frequently visited facilities.

Whether you are managing a shopping mall, airport, stadium, casino or hospital, these rigid routines mean that team members wind up visiting restrooms that are not in need of cleaning or restocking. As a result, product is swapped out from dispensers prematurely to prevent a second visit later that wastes even more valuable team member time and product.

Conversely, if a restroom has an unexpected spike in usage, there is no way for staff to know that supplies are running out faster than anticipated. This leads to empty dispensers, dirty facilities, unhappy users, complaints and, ultimately, a damaged reputation for the facility.

As a result, the traditional janitorial workflow impacts budgets negatively in several ways: For facility teams facing labor strains, it allocates staff time poorly, resulting in both unneeded visits, as well as, disruptive unplanned emergency visits when a restroom needs restocking before a scheduled cleaning. For increasingly stretched restroom supply budgets, it results in the wasted product and unnecessary cost that comes from the early replacement of partially filled paper rolls and soap cassettes.

On top of these challenges, facility teams are under increasing pressure to deliver a positive user experience to customers who have heightened expectations of restroom hygiene in the post-COVID world.

So, with tightening budgets, high labor turnover and the continual need to keep customer satisfaction scores high, what can facility managers do to operate more cost-effectively?

Use technology to do things smarter and save

Onvation from Kimberly-Clark Professional is a comprehensive smart restroom solution that helps facility managers achieve janitorial workflow optimization and get more value from their maintenance budget. Combining wireless sensors, connected devices and a robust data analytics platform, Onvation empowers facility managers with insights on restroom customer usage patterns, consumable product levels and staff performance.

Usage tracking in real time

Onvation eliminates data blind spots and the guesswork of fixed cleaning schedules. Facility managers get real-time data via a comprehensive dashboard with information delivered straight from each restroom using networks of self-powered IoT devices.

Facility managers can coordinate maintenance more efficiently when they have visibility on the status of restrooms in the entire facility, from restroom traffic to current levels of hand soap, sanitizer, paper towels and toilet paper.

Staying clean and in compliance

It’s more critical than ever for facility managers to ensure that their operations remain aligned with hygiene regulations and standards from government agencies like the CDC, OSHA and local health departments as well as industry certifications like the Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) managed by ISSA (International Sanitary Supply Association).

The comprehensive site-wide tracking in Onvation helps facility managers ensure that their team is doing everything necessary to maintain hygienic conditions within restrooms. Onvation tracks cleaner task completions, enabling facility managers to measure the performance of individual team members and identify when coaching may be needed.

Onvation smart restroom analytics provide an objective measure of a facility’s cleanliness and staff performance, helping facility managers streamline maintenance processes, increase staff accountability, improve cost efficiency and demonstrate the team’s value to the larger organization.

Plan more effectively

Manual inventory tracking and replenishment can lead to shortages or overstocking. In either case, the end result is increased costs and waste. In a time of rapidly rising supply costs, that hits budgets hard. Monitoring consumables usage in real time helps ensure that supplies are there when needed and excess inventory situations are avoided.

With continued uncertainties in labor markets, Onvation can help deploy resources more efficiently and streamline workforce costs. Combining historical and real-time data, Onvation analytics forecast usage trends, plan more effectively and eliminate emergency maintenance situations, helping improve labor utilization and reduce overtime costs.

An app that helps keep things clean

On the frontlines, the workflow of janitorial staff is coordinated using connected devices accessing the Onvation Compass^® app.

Available in six languages, this easy-to-use app delivers immediate service alerts and enables team members to record service completion information that feeds directly into the Onvation dashboard. Refill alerts on the app also include links to videos showing how to service the specific dispenser in need of care. With high turnover being a persistent issue for facility management teams, these videos can help new employees get up to speed quickly.

By eliminating the need for unnecessary restroom checks, maintenance schedules can be dynamically determined based on urgency and traffic. This allows managers to redeploy staff as needed and proactively respond to unexpected high usage situations as soon as they arise, helping ensure that users always experience a clean, well-stocked restroom.

Success story: cleaning up at the casino

For a real-world look at how Onvation can help high-traffic venues optimize labor and save money, we examined a 350K+ square foot casino in the northeast where the cleaning staff of 100 was responsible for 155 rooms.¹

Prior to Onvation, the team struggled to keep up with the demands of this always open, always busy gambling center. After a successful test on eight restrooms, the facility management team decided to install Onvation across the entire property.

The result was a big win: With Onvation alert-based cleaning and real-time analytics in place, facility staff no longer had to conduct routine product checks. This new approach saved over 15,000 hours annually,² the equivalent of 8 full-time employees earning a total of $273,205³ in cleaner wages. This change allowed the casino to redeploy cleaners to higher value activities and helped keep the facility sparkling.

Smart restroom technology delivers

The future of facilities management is here today. Smart restroom technology is a proven solution that helps high-traffic venues streamline hygiene management. Onvation delivers measurable ROI for janitorial workflows by utilizing labor more efficiently, reducing supply expenditures and tracking activity, allowing facilities to:

• Improve user satisfaction by helping ensure an always-clean experience.
• Spend less time resolving complaints by eliminating empty dispensers.
• Maximize labor productivity with proactive servicing.
• Focus on higher value tasks like high-touch cleaning.
• Reduce supply expenses and labor costs with timely re-stocking.