Cleaning equipment management can be a struggling task for anyone when we are taking into account maintenance and repair duties, downtimes, machine replacement or spare parts orders. Direct machine purchases have been driving the market, but short-term and long-term cleaning machine rentals are appearing as a recurring option in the last years.
With these two options, it may now be more difficult to decide about renting or buying cleaning machines nowadays. In the next lines we are going to solve some questions which, being very obvious, are essential to make a decision. They will help us in determining our return on investment or ROI and the time we need to recover the investment if we made a decision to buy.
The first step we must consider is getting in contact with the financial department in order to know which costs arise from the cleaning tasks. These are the labor costs and those other indirect costs which you may consider. It is important that you don't forget to include also the returns on cleaning tasks if there where, so we have the exact costs per hour.
Next, these three questions which follow will also help you in deciding about renting or buying cleaning equipment:
How much time does it take to clean your facilities?
This question may be difficult to answer if we don't have an adequate hygiene and cleaning plan and we perform cleaning tasks irregularly, but it is as easy to answer as just noting when you start and finish cleaning. If we can't do this, we should question ourselves why we are letting these tasks aside, maybe having a cleaning machine constantly in our facilities will help us in having our floors always clean.
Which are the costs that arise from renting?
When renting a machine we must not only think on the most direct, obvious and implicit costs. It is important to take into account shipping costs, taxes and any other accessory cost. We must also consider the opportunity costs if we hadn't been able to finish or start a spontaneous work for not having a cleaning machine in disposal
How frequently is the machine used in your facilities?
This is maybe the most important question and we must be predictive while solving it. We must be objective while making numbers about how many times we must have to use rental services if we don't buy the machine now. Many times our facilities aren't cleaned as many times as we would like due to the constant rental of the machine. The higher the number of times we must use rental services to perform our cleaning tasks, the sooner we would recover the buying investment.