contractor success Landscape Today’s facilities tend to be used very differently from those in the past. By: Robert Kravitz The New Office O Once upon a time during the 1990s, two building service contractors (BSCs) just happened to bump into each other outside a five-story office building. They were both bidding on the clean-ing contract for the facility, and both were outside measuring the building’s square footage. Both BSCs needed just a few facts about the building in order to determine their bids such as the property’s square footage; how much of that area was “cleanable” (meaning space that was in use and required clean-ing); and how often it was to be cleaned. The days of putting together cleaning bids with such basic information are now over. Today’s facilities tend to be used very dif-ferently from those in the past. For instance, office work is no longer confined to the traditional 9 to 5; in fact, in some organizations, workers are just as likely to be working from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. And, in many facilities, the entire look, configuration and use of the space is radi-cally different from what it was just a de-cade ago. These differences have a big impact on how facilities are cleaned and the cost of cleaning whether those tasks are per-formed by an in-house staff or by a BSC. In fact, in many ways office spaces now have an entirely new “landscape.” Backpack vacuums can be a good choice for both traditional and open space offices because of their greater flexibility and maneuverability. 38 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • July 2013 Image courtesy of Powr-Flite
CMM – Archives July 2013: 38
