Robotics in healthcare - Success story
How this major US Healthcare provider beat rising costs and labor shortages
Our customer is one of the US largest healthcare providers in the US. They generate over $10bn in revenue and operate facilities nation-wide. Their premises see thousands of patients come through every single day which makes keeping spaces clean quite the challenge. To add to this already challenging task, there's the fact that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find cleaning personnel and that costs are sky-rocketing, even outpacing inflation in some cases.
The challenge
This success story centers around one of their many facilities, a hospital in the US northwest. The dimensions are mind blowing, over 10,000,000 sq ft and more than 1,000 employees with the sole task of maintaining the highest cleaning standards. Although the hospital boasts of a formidable workforce, they noticed these factors starting to make their job more difficult. Their goal was to make their workforce more efficient and productive. They saw that vacuuming took up a disproportionate amount of time. Around 25% of their entire workforce spent their full working hours vacuuming. After performing the calculations, the rough estimate on just how much money it costs the hospital to vacuum this entire space once, was a staggering $20,000.
If you want to see how we got to those numbers make sure to check out the whitepaper. It goes into all of the details, the numbers, the ROI, the set up and also the market trends that led to this situation.
The Goals
The hospital needed a tool to take care of the vacuuming, lightening the workload for the cleaning team so they could focus on the higher-touch tasks. FieldBots was the perfect solution for them. But being such a big organization, with so many stakeholders involved, the process wasn’t as smooth as we had hoped.
We agreed that a pilot was the perfect solution for them. That way they could dip their toes in the pool of automation without breaking the bank. Our FieldBots experts crafted a completely custom solution taking into account all of their requirements. They were pleasantly surprised when they saw that they could connect robots from any brand to the software, to avoid any kind of future lock-in.
We ended up deciding to go with 12 units of the Cleanfix S170 Navi and a single unit of the Zaco X1000. We go into a lot more detail on why we picked these particular robots for this project. Click here to get the full story.
The results
The numbers speak for themselves. The hospital deemed this pilot a complete success and it reassured them that robots and automation are the way forward. As mentioned in the one pager you can see right above this paragraph, they've put in an additional 200 robots order, to that way cover even more surface of their over 10 million square feet.
The chart displayed below also shows the numbers that they were dealing with for this particular pilot.
The results
What exactly do these lines represent? Here's a quick explanation:
- The red line shows the amount of money they save each month, by having robot do the vacuuming instead of a person. Vacuuming floors is a time-intensive task, we calculated that for this particular pilot, the cost of vacuuming was around $2,760 per month.
- The blue line represents the payments that the client made over time. It's highest point is right at the beginning, when they make the payment for the robots. After that it drops down to a bare minimum monthly cost.
- The black line just adds up the costs or payments made over time.
The point where the black and red line cross, roughly at 9 months, is when they recovered their initial investment. After that it's pretty much all profit.
If you are interested in learning how to get these numbers, you can download our completely free Whitepaper. Click here to get the full story.
