3 Ways Carefully Tracking Your Cleaning Supply Inventory Saves You Time and Money

A recent survey by Facility Cleaning Decision found the average respondent bought $250,000 in cleaning supplies each year…to clean approximately 1.2 million square feet.

In any business, the larger your numbers get, the more mistakes you make. At least, until you take the time to analyze and optimize your processes for efficiency, anyway.

It’s easy to get complacent with the way you do things. And after all, it takes a fair amount of time to inventory your product.

However, keeping an organized and efficiently-managed inventory on hand leads to benefits like these:

1. Happier Customers

How do you keep your customers (whether internal or external) happier than they could ever be with the competition?

You know what the competition does. And then you top it.

…But you can only do that by keeping close tabs on your inventory.

Do you have the top-performing products that deliver the results your customers want? Do you always have the supplies you need in stock so you can do the work your customers want in the time frame promised?

Do you spend within your budget when purchasing supplies so you don’t have to cut corners elsewhere?

2. Reduce Inventory Costs

Let’s say you’re around that quarter-million dollar budget with your cleaning supply inventory.

Do you buy in bulk so you can negotiate reduced prices? Do you know what you already have in inventory so you don’t buy product that sits around for a year or longer?

Will you find inventory you completely forget about…only to never use it?

3. You Can Catch Inventory Management Inefficiencies Faster

Let’s say you use software to track your cleaning supply inventory. Say you use a high-priced cleaning solution to maintain a large floor that must be kept in top shape year-round.

You analyze your inventory data. And you find that you must reorder this expensive cleaning solution twice as often as you thought.

Typically, you might shrug your shoulders and assume that’s just the way it is because the floor is so large.

But thanks to your software, you can see that one particular employee keeps using a lot of this cleaning solution.

So you talk to them about how they’re doing the work. And, you find out they use a lot more of that solution than necessary because they didn’t understand how to properly mix it.

As a result, you save thousands of dollars a year by simply helping your employee understand the correct way to mix the solution, rather than just letting the problem persist.

As you can see, if you run a significant budget of cleaning products, it makes good sense to track your inventory carefully. The challenge simply lies in creating a system that works for you.