Contract cleaners often are a traditional bunch. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right? But in today’s fast-paced world, that attitude might not cut it.

Building service contractors need to take a good, long look at their technology tools, such as computer systems, software and communications devices. Chances are, they’ll find ample room for improvement.

For instance, just about every BSC uses some form of office software, but choosing which one to use depends on several factors, including cost, the size of the business and employee expertise.

The first piece of business software Jerry Schmidt learned was Microsoft Office, which he used for invoicing for many years. Schmidt is the owner of Shore is Clean in Whiteford, Md. For novices, Microsoft Office has many advantages, he says.

“It tells you exactly what to do,” Schmidt says. “Everything is right there. If you missed something, it will tell you. It doesn’t aggravate you to death.”

Now that he is more adept with computers, Schmidt prefers Intuit’s Quickbooks Pro. It allows him to quickly locate his clients’ ordering history. If a customer ordered a particular towel from him two years ago, he can quickly find their previous orders to track down the item.

“It helps me with organization and customer history,” Schmidt says. “When you can go to a customer and hit the find button to see their entire ordering history, that’s a big plus.”

Present and accounted for
Instead of devoting technology resources to its bookkeeping program, PHC Building Maintenance in Portland, Ore., has instead focused on a custom-designed electronic attendance system that has saved time and money, says the company’s president, John Murphy.

The company began using the system 15 years ago. After a failed version using bar codes, the company’s 700 frontline workers now make a local phone call to sign in and out using a caller ID system.

“We can watch them arrive at the job on a computer screen,” Murphy says. “It’s really important because we work for the local school district and someone must be there at 6 a.m. to open the school or we’re in a lot of trouble. If someone doesn’t show up, the system calls the supervisor.”

The system captures all the attendance information in a digital format, which has streamlined the payroll process. Unlike other businesses of its size, PHC has just one bookkeeper to handle payroll for all 1,200 employees. The computer passes all of the information electronically to an external paycheck processor.

PHC can also create any number of reports from the captured data. For example, they can pull up a worker’s total hours for the last six months or the combined hours all employees worked for one client.

This high-tech system replaces the low-tech methods of yesteryear—employees using time clocks to punch paper time cards or, worse, using the honor system to write down their time on a piece of paper. Supervisors had to collect these cards and then spend a significant portion of their day adding up the entries on a calculator. A large group of secretaries had to create each employee’s paycheck on a manual typewriter.

Not only was the system slow, it was prone to error.

“We had whole payrolls that were wrong,” Murphy recalls.

Murphy helped bring in the new system before becoming president. To convince upper management that the electronic system was not just a newfangled toy, Murphy made a parallel run of payroll for two months to compare the old system with the new.

“I was able to show that there was a payback in a matter of months,” Murphy says.

GMI Building Services Inc., San Diego, uses a similar attendance system that is tied into not only payroll but also work scheduling. The progressive company also uses advanced, custom-designed work ticket software, according to Alan Wagemester, sales and marketing manager.

When a client contacts a GMI customer service representative, the employee inputs the request into the software program. The request is given a job number and the assignment is given to the front-line workers. Once the work is performed, the worker signs off on it and customer service follows up with the client before closing out the work ticket, which is then sent on to the accounting department for billing.

Whatever system they use, many cleaning companies are seeing their service order requests becoming far more electronic. The days of a request coming in by fax and then that sheet of paper floating around the office are long gone.

“Contracts fly back and forth now electronically,” says Dick Dotts, president of Diversified Maintenance Services in South Pasadena, California. “We aren’t paperless yet but it’s moving that way.”

Dotts envisions an even more high-tech work request system for the future. There will be an icon on the computer desktop of each tenant in a client’s building. Every person (or those given the authority) will click on the icon and put in a request for service. The system will eliminate phone calls to the landlord and could eventually lead to just one bill for several services.

“It would expand the kind of services that the contractor provides,” Dotts says. “It would become a control point that covers all service, like a call center does. It could include everything from the bottled water company to the coffee company. It would be a click-and-go system—the company concierge.”

Communications tools
Electronic work ordering is just one form of cleaner-client communication that has been transformed by technology. The PHC Web site is not as intricate as many, but it has served the company well. The site lists contact information, including e-mail addresses, for the employees, which has improved communication with its clients.

Perhaps more exciting, however, is how technology can improve communication within a cleaning company, particularly with non-English-speaking employees. Slowly but surely, new software is being developed to help with this dilemma. Diversified Maintenance Services creates its own training tools and always makes a duplicate in Spanish, which it distributes to employees via e-mail or on CD-ROM. But there is still room for growth.

“It’s a real frustration. It really slows things down,” says Murphy, who has employees who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic and more. “Maybe there could be an automated, computerized translation system. That would be incredible.”

In the field
Technology also can assist cleaning companies outside the office walls. For example, cellular phones can be extremely beneficial for employees who are on the road or spread over many client locations. A similar, but much newer, technology is the cell phone/two-way radio combination. Without strict usage guidelines, however, these technologies are easily abused.

“We were blindsided and we got burned on the cell phones,” Murphy says. “We started without a strong management structure and we weren’t paying close enough attention. We’re in the process now of really clamping down on cell phone use.”

Like cell phones, laptop and hand-held computers also can be double-edged swords. While they are extremely helpful for off-site employees, particularly supervisors, they also can lead to costly mistakes.

“We’re stingy with laptops,” Murphy says. “They are easily lost or stolen—both the equipment and the information that’s in them.”

For now, the company provides a large bank of computers at its headquarters that supervisors can access at any time.

PHC also tried out hand-held computers but found that many employees lost them or tired of using them. Murphy thinks portable electronic devices are not essential — yet.

“They are toys right now,” Murphy says. “I’m sure I’ll be eating my words in 15 years. The computer is an essential business machine now and 15 years ago it was more of a toy too.”

Diversified Maintenance Services has a different outlook on portable technology. Supervisors regularly use laptops while in the field. The company also uses custom-designed software on the hand-held computer to help with quality assurance.

“We have the ability to do job-site inspections and enter the information right into the Palm Pilot,” says Dotts. “They can then sync it with the computer and the database back in the office.”

As for the future of these “toys,” Murphy sees room for improvement. He would like global positioning systems on cell phones so he can more easily locate off-site employees. Murphy also dreams of laptops with longer battery life, lower prices, and better security measures for protecting the information on the computer.




POSTED ON: 3/1/2003