Opportunity

Valley View School District 365U in Romeoville, Illinois is comprised of approximately 24 buildings, serves over 16,000 K-12 students and employs 2,400 full-time faculty. Valley View School District works with a diverse population of students and faculty to foster a sense of inclusive learning and safety for all. Partnering with GSF USA, a global cleaning services company, helps Valley View keep their buildings clean and safe so students and teachers can focus on learning and teaching, all while staying healthy. Disinfected and sanitized buildings are key for keeping students and staff healthy all year long.

Matt Pawlowski is the Building Maintenance Repair Technician for the Valley View Administrative Building, where Whiz, an autonomous vacuum sweeper by ICE Robotics and SoftBank Robotics, is deployed. He says challenges for his team and the GSF cleaning team are “the added amounts of disinfecting and sanitizing that staff have taken on, with limited amounts of time.”

The Administrative Building is made up of 33 offices, six conference rooms, and four break rooms. There is a lot of vacuuming, disinfecting, sanitizing and cleaning that has to be done every day. Miguel Barajas is the Branch Manager for GSF at Valley View. He oversees GSF cleaning staff across the district and says, “the usual challenge is not enough time to do all the tasks that need to be completed on a daily basis.”

Carpet Care in Schools

Because GSF has seen success with Whiz at other locations, it led them to identify the Valley View Administrative Building as a perfect spot to deploy Whiz to handle soft surface cleaning. The autonomous vacuum sweeper uses an AI platform to deliver a higher quality, more efficient clean. Plus, it offers proof of performance that carpet care tasks are being completed.

The Administrative Building has over 8,000 square feet of cleanable carpet. Bringing on Whiz was the best way to meet demand and free up cleaning staff to focus on higher priority tasks. While following its routes, the robot avoids people and other obstacles like furniture. It cleans up to 15,000 square feet per charge and notifies operators when it is done operating.

Grant Mackall, Branch Manager at GSF says, “with Whiz we’re looking to automate the simplest of tasks and vacuuming big areas is a simple task that doesn’t require specialized skills. We are able to free up time for workers to focus on detailed tasks.”

Results

Since adding Whiz to the cleaning team at Valley View Administrative Building, Matt Pawlowski has seen results and so have others using the building. With Whiz, detail work has improved, cubicles look cleaner and Pawlowski has noticed visibly cleaner glass–there aren’t any streaks and finger prints. This is because cleaning staff have been able to focus more on specialized tasks.

Miguel points out that, “before Whiz, we were vacuuming [the hallways and lobbies] two hours every night.” Since adding Whiz, the team has freed up 1.25 hours each night to focus on the detail work. That’s an extra 6.25 hours a week and 25 hours each month that can be spent on more specialized tasks to improve the overall clean. He adds, ”Whiz is helping us to achieve our goals by freeing time for our cleaners to be able to do other things and increase productivity, and we see better results.”

Download the case study: GSF USA and Whiz at Valley View School District_Case Study