a suburban Illinois school
A Suburban Illinois School Hands Floor Scrubbing to an Autonomous Robot
A suburban Illinois school added an autonomous floor scrubber and reports 4 to 6 hours saved a day, freeing staff for deeper cleaning across a large campus.
Deployment at a glance
- 4 to 6
- hours saved a day, as reported by the contractor
- 30K to 70K
- sq ft cleaned per shift by the autonomous scrubber
- 470,000
- sq ft of facility space in this case study
- 0 new hires
- added headcount for deeper cleaning, per contractor
Based on a documented real-world deployment. Figures are from public reporting; the organization is not named.
Floor care that outgrew the cleaning crew
A suburban Illinois school was asking its cleaning team to care for about 470,000 sq ft of building, with 24 cleaning staff at the high school. Routine floor scrubbing had to compete for the same hours as everything else on the list.
After COVID, extra disinfection work arrived on top of day to day cleaning, and staff found it hard to fit routine care in alongside it. The robot supplier also lists reduced floor and door damage caused by operator error among the machine's benefits.
Choosing a scrubber and redeploying the crew
The contract cleaning company chose an autonomous floor scrubber from the robot supplier and put it to work on the school's floor scrubbing. Each shift, the machine covers 30K to 70K sq ft, which set the scale of what the robot could take off the crew's list.
The crew stayed. Staff were moved to other areas of the building, so deeper cleaning could happen without adding headcount. The robot carried the repetitive scrubbing while people moved to thorough work elsewhere.
Hours returned, and where they went
The contractor reports that the scrubber saves 4 to 6 hours a day. Those hours were not cut from the payroll. They went into deeper cleaning across a building where routine work had been crowding it out.
Looking ahead, the contractor projects 20 to 30 hours a week once the school fully reopens. That is a projection tied to full reopening, and it sits apart from the daily figure above. Fewer floor and door incidents from operator error were also cited as a benefit of the machine.
What a school scrubber deployment asks of a buyer
Service Robot Co. is a full service, vendor neutral robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robot across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train, and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network. One partner, one number, for the working life of the machine.
For a school, commercial robot leasing starts with a site assessment. We map the floor, match coverage to the square footage each shift must clean, and quote one fixed lease after that assessment. Our robots come on a three year lease, so the cost is spread over the term rather than arriving as one large outlay. Go live support, onsite dispatch and remote triage cover the stretch when a unit goes offline and the custodial crew needs an answer. Ask whether a spare unit can hold the floor during a repair before you sign.
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