The Ultimate Inventory Tracking Process for a Cleaning Business

The U.S. cleaning industry is the largest globally. According to data, there are about 1,063,988 janitorial businesses in the U.S., employing over 3.24 million people. While the industry continues thriving into the near and far future, there’s an increased need to improve inventory tracking and management to serve the growing consumer base better.

Inventory tracking and management is a less focused area of janitorial businesses. However, poor inventory tracking and management can lead to your crew starting work late, missing schedules entirely, or wasting money and resources with excess cleaning supplies and equipment.

Properly tracking and managing inventory in your janitorial business will save you money and ensure you deliver great customer satisfaction by serving work orders on time.

Here’s what you need to know about inventory tracking for cleaning businesses and how to implement an effective strategy for your operation. 

What is Inventory Tracking for a Business?

Inventory represents the physical assets owned by your business. These may be raw materials, equipment, or supplies to complete a work order. These assets are typically bought from a supplier and work up your supply chain to the intended crew member or location.

Therefore, inventory is crucial to running your janitorial business. Without inventory tracking and management, you can’t procure cleaning supplies, equipment, and other things your crew needs to complete work orders to customer satisfaction.

The Three Main Inventory Management Techniques

There are different inventory management techniques uniquely suited for various businesses or operations. These techniques help prioritize the items you reorder and maintain good inventory to meet customer demands, schedule, and lower costs.

The three main inventory management techniques include:

• Push – This technique forecasts demand for a product, ensuring you reorder before the crew or customer asks for it
• Pull – This technique gets an item after the customer or crew orders it. It’s typically used for special orders. 
• Just-in-time – This technique orders inventory just before the customer or crew needs it. However, it needs a strong supply chain to work effectively. 

How You Can Track and Manage Inventory in Your Cleaning Business

Here are a few effective ways to track and manage inventory in your janitorial business for better service delivery.

Incentivize Employees to Keep Better Track of Inventory

Paying employees good wages is insufficient to motivate them to maintain proper practices such as efficient and effective inventory control. You need to engage with your crew about inventory management practices purposefully, ensure everyone is on the same page, and use effective methods to track supplies and equipment they need.

Ideally, you should add inventory management to your crew’s onboarding and ongoing training. You can also incentivize the best employees at the end of the year with rewards such as a bonus or a free movie ticket to ensure everyone is committed to efficient and effective inventory management for your business. 

Use Bulk Storage

If your crew services various buildings and locations, you can invest in bulk storage within these locations to minimize inventory movement. This will reduce the lead time between a crew member requesting and getting equipment or supplies. 

This can be a bulk storage area in the building or a pantry. For smaller locations, if you’re serving an ongoing client, you can clean out an existing room or get an extra room and convert it into a storage area. 

Bulk storage is the best place to hold large quantities of supplies, covering one to two order cycles depending on how quickly you can restock the supplies.

Develop a Storage System

Storing inventory close to or within their needed locations is a very effective way of tracking and managing inventory compared to working with a centralized location. However, this setup can only work with a well-developed storage system.

A storage system outlines the standards your employees should follow when handling inventory to make tracking and management easier. This includes informing the office admins when a supply runs out of stock or is missing.

A well-developed storage system also helps save your employees time when they switch locations since they don’t have to look for the previous crew to get updates on inventory and look around for what they need.

Invest in Janitorial Inventory Management Software

A janitorial inventory management software puts together all the best practices for inventory management in a janitorial business and makes them available in a mobile and accessible solution.

With inventory management software, you have an advanced and effective storage system that automatically tracks inventory as it moves across locations, helps you monitor what’s missing or out of stock in real time, and helps you use the available data to schedule work orders and ensure optimal service delivery.

Therefore, it becomes much easier to identify discrepancies, and your crew can fulfill work orders and head to various locations confident they can complete the job as required. 

Get an Inventory Management Solution from the Experts

Effective inventory management can be powerful enough to separate successful janitorial businesses from those with poor customer service reputations. Talk to an expert today and learn how to use software to improve inventory tracking and management for your cleaning business.

Author Bio

Garrett Wilson is the President and Co-Founder of FieldBin. FieldBin is a field service management software designed for trade business owners. The software allows professionals in the fields of Plumbing, HVAC, Electricians, Roofing, and Commercial Cleaning to solve their back-office nightmares quickly. Garrett has expertise in Marketing and Project Management, with experience in multiple industries, including cyber security, healthcare, and manufacturing.