1 – Labor Costs

Even before the Great Resignation, employee costs have been on the rise. Insurance, benefits, and rising wages have made managing a growing workforce costly for companies. These costs are manageable as long as they continue focusing on revenue-generating activities. Unfortunately, when you’re paying your staff to clean, it’s not making your company any additional money. It’s increasing your overhead. 

Depending upon how often you need to clean, these costs add up quickly, costing companies anywhere from thousands of dollars per month to tens of thousands. If you’re not tracking the non-revenue-generating labor cost in your business, you could be wasting more money than you realize.

2 – Equipment

If you clean frequently enough, you may have the necessary equipment. Smaller facilities may be able to get away with ladders and vacuums. Larger facilities require more expensive solutions.

• Scissor lifts to get into overhead spaces.
• Complex vacuums with enough hose to reach those spaces.
• Brooms/blowers to get dust down to the floor where staff can sweet or vacuum it up

It adds up quickly.

Your company may only use this equipment for cleaning purposes. If so, your team is maintaining and storing sparingly used equipment that isn’t preventing the problem.

Scissor lifts alone can cost between $5,000-$50,000 depending upon the size needed for your ceiling height. If you’re not cleaning frequently, renting one may be an option. Although it could still cost you a couple of hundred dollars each time, and it doesn’t include the cost of vacuums, blowers, and other equipment.

Although frowned upon, many facilities use compressed air for blowing down combustible dust. While this may seem like a low or no-cost option since your facility probably already has an air compressor on site, the electricity used to compress the air is not free. In fact, that air can cost 30 cents or more per 1000 standard cubic feet per minute (SCFM). A typical blowdown process could easily use millions of cubic feet of compressed air. This is just one of many hidden costs that are often overlooked.

3 – Lost Productivity

You may be thinking to yourself, “I can deal with paying my employees to work an extra day each month and to rent some equipment.” Unfortunately, the most considerable cost for many facilities is likely lost productivity. Manufacturing and Processing operations often run 24/7 nowadays to keep up with demand. Employees work across multiple shifts to minimize downtime. 

Every hour of downtime minimizes your bottom line.

For some businesses, this could be thousands of dollars per hour. But data suggests it’s far worse than this. A study in 2021 of the world’s largest manufacturers shows that plants lost as much as a full day of production every month due to a number of factors. 

According to Alexander Hill, Chief Global Strategist at Senseye commented, “Unplanned downtime is the curse of the industrial sector. When expensive production lines and machinery fall silent, organizations stop earning, and those investments start costing rather than making money. The costs can spiral to well over $100,000 per hour for large manufacturers in almost all industrial sectors.”

Even if you aren’t one of the largest processing facilities in the world, chances are it’s costing you thousands of dollars per hour every time you shut down for cleaning. Add up those costs over the year, and the impact on the bottom line is clear.

4 – Insurance Related Costs

In a case study completed on an AZEK Company blending operation, Plant Engineer, Tom Matechik, discussed insurance’s role in manual cleanings. After an insurance inspector expressed concern over dust buildup, they had a choice. Let their insurance costs go up or increase cleaning efforts to ensure dust buildup was acceptable during an assessment. Instead of managing cleanings with internal staff, they hired a third-party cleaning company to clean. This was costly but possibly less expensive than an increase on their premiums.

5 – OSHA Fines

Manual cleanings are effective when completed often and comprehensively in your facility. But you never know when an OSHA inspector may drop by. You could be one week away from your next scheduled cleaning when they stop by. 

Often, they’ll schedule a follow-up visit so long as there haven’t been previous citations. But these repeat visits still require cleaning and another trip around the facility.

Repeat violations could result in expensive fines and required cleanings. For example, take Watson Wood Works [link to case study on site]. They had fallen behind on cleanings when an inspector popped by. The result? A violation that would have required them to shut down for cleanings twice per year or cost them a severe fine. Jesse Watson, the owner, estimates it would have cost them tens of thousands of dollars in cleaning costs and lost productivity.

Luckily, they found an alternative solution. But more on that later.

6 – Workplace Safety and Satisfaction

The Great Resignation has made evident the flexibility the modern workforce has. If current working conditions aren’t ideal, there’s always another option. Even if you clean frequently enough and have collectors on your machinery, some plants still swim in floating particulate. Then, when it comes to cleaning, who loves taking the time to jump in a scissor lift and vacuum out overhead spaces?

Given the opportunities in the marketplace, if your employees don’t feel safe in their position. Or, even if it’s just a matter of not coming out of the plant covered in dust, there’s probably somewhere else they can work.

The enormous cost of turnover should give manufacturers and processors reason to pause and consider their environment. Otherwise, it could start to impact product quality and productivity as a whole, costing you more money in the long run.

1 – Minimal Labor Required. 

Because overhead spaces are the most expensive and time-intensive to clean, SonicAire fans eliminate the bulk of the work required to clean dust. Fugitive dust settles on the floor and can easily be swept up or vacuumed without impacting operations.

All of those manual cleanings are gone, and so is the required labor. At most, you’ll need to do a periodic spot check for any areas that have some dust buildup.

2 – Rent/Maintain Less Equipment

If you don’t already have a scissor lift, you shouldn’t need one now unless it’s to change out a lightbulb. You should be able to rent one for those purposes—no need for complicated vacuums and blowers. 

Since the dust ends up on the floor, a broom, autovac, or floor cleaner can take care of the dust.

3 – Maintain Productivity

The highest cost of all, lost productivity, becomes a non-issue. With those cleanings removed from the schedule, there’s no need for long periods of downtime. Now you’ll have to blame it on something else, like maintenance on processing equipment.

Imagine getting days of productivity back each year. Picture your staff working on things that generate revenue for your company. And don’t forget, you won’t have to schedule or manage those annoying cleanings anymore either—more time for you to focus on what’s critical to your business.

4 – Avoid Insurance Premium Increases Caused By Fugitive Dust

Remember AZEK, the company that scheduled cleaning crews before each insurance appraisal? They avoided increases to their premiums thanks to installing SonicAire fans.

Now, they don’t worry about visits from their insurer. They know their fans are proactively protecting them from fugitive dust problems.

5 – Avoid Citations and Fines Related to Dust Buildup in Overhead Spaces

The most recent NFPA 652 standard lists fans for continuous dust control (e.g., SonicAire) as an approved method  for preventing dust buildup. 

Watson Wood Works avoided additional fines and scrutiny because they chose an approved product to mitigate dust buildup.

Helping businesses like Watson Wood Works stay compliant and stay productive is  why we rolled out the SonicAire Compliance Guarantee.

As long as SonicAire fans are correctly installed and maintained according to our engineers’ layout/engineering recommendations, they will keep your overhead spaces in compliance with the applicable NFPA dust requirements.  And if they don’t, we’ll provide a full refund on the cost of fans or reimburse the cost of any imposed fine, whichever is less.

*More Details at https://www.sonicaire.com/compliance-guarantee/

6 – Keep Employees Happy

You won’t realize just how dusty your facility is until it isn’t. 

Before installing SonicAire fans at The AZEK Company’s Corey Street Plant, visitors could see rings of dust floating around lights in the blending tower. Now, you can clearly see the lights, and there’s noticeably less dust floating in the facility.

In a recent White Paper published on this very subject, a third-party testing firm measured the density of dust particulate with and without SonicAire Fans in two AZEK facilities. At the Corey Street Plant, where they installed SonicAire fans, levelized particulate loads were around 2mg/m3. These levels were 1/3 to 1/4 the amounts at the Keyser Plant, where fans weren’t operating yet. Even more disturbing, the Keyser Plant saw microbursts of dust whenever the blending tower was operational, above 40mg/m3 at times,

See the full white paper here.

Preventative measures like SonicAire not only create a better work environment. They create a safer one as well, potentially reducing employee turnover and health issues over time.