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How Your University Can Use Data Analysis To Improve Your Custodial Services

Making Your School More Sustainable with Custodial Data Analysis

In addition to sanitation, sustainability has become a growing area of concern for custodial managers and school administrators.

Fortunately, implementing smart technology into custodial procedures can not only aid teams in completing more efficient hygiene procedures, but can also help managers and administrators develop plans to adopt more sustainable practices.

Let’s explore how custodial data can be used to benefit sustainability plans.

Inventory Reduction

Keeping schools adequately stocked with inventory (toilet paper, soap, paper towels, sanitary products, etc.) can be challenging for custodial teams. However, the reports generated through custodial data collection can provide valuable insight into how much inventory is typically used during a given timeline.

Basing inventory orders on custodial data can reduce the tendency to order too much or too little, which also reduces the need for an abundance of storage space.

Utility Consumption

Custodial data can also be used to monitor occupancy in classrooms and other areas of school buildings. Doing so can aid custodial teams in creating a plan to reduce utility consumption. For example, automatic or motion-detecting lights can be installed to reduce power waste. Occupancy monitoring can also assist in the creation of plans to utilize heating and cooling more efficiently. For example, turning off thermostats in rooms that are unused throughout most of the year may be an option for utility reduction.

Water Management

Custodial data analysis can also indicate which sinks and toilets receive the most traffic in a school. These highly-frequented facilities can be implemented into water management plans by installing sensors or replacing old taps and toilets with water-saving options. If budget is a concern, adding these new installments to the most frequently used facilities can still help reduce water waste. Over time, these savings may pave the way toward further tap and toilet replacements.

Bin Accessibility

Garbage generation is one of the most difficult areas to address when creating a plan for sustainability. However, with custodial data, teams can carefully analyze school traffic in order to strategize where to place recycling bins.

Because the goal is to make recycling an easy task, placing the bins where they’re accessible but not in the way is a key part of encouraging participation.

Sustainable Changes

Finally, custodial data can monitor the costs associated with keeping schools clean (inventory, equipment, cleaning products). Teams can organize these costs into straightforward reports that facility managers can reference when they are in search of more sustainable products.

Knowing the current costs incurred for regular inventory – like soaps, paper towels, and bin liners – can make cost-saving opportunities easier to gauge. Comparing the lifespan of reusable products with the current cost of disposable products becomes substantially easier when analysis can provide accurate answers.

While a disposable product may appear to be a few cents cheaper than a reusable product on an order form, the potential to save becomes obvious when examining cost reports for that item over a monthly or quarterly timeline.