Allan Industries is testing what automation looks like on the ground floor of a union town. At a newly built commercial property on Market Street in Philadelphia, autonomous vacuums and a robotic scrubber now work alongside the company’s union cleaning crews, taking over the long hallways and open lobbies that used to eat up hours of every shift.

Jim Strite, chief operating officer, and Dave Iacovino, director of Philadelphia operations, have spent the past several years figuring out how the technology fits a workforce that did not exactly ask for it, and a client base that wants savings without losing service quality.

A midsize company with a long reach

Allan Industries was founded in 1985 by Paul Allan, who remains the company’s owner, alongside a second partner, Michael Carroll. Strite, who has worked in the cleaning industry for 40 years and at Allan for 15, described the company as “a privately held, I would say medium-sized company,” headquartered in Rockaway, New Jersey, and operating in 12 states with 2,200 employees.

The company’s roots are in janitorial services, and it has since added construction cleanup, fire and water damage restoration, and stone floor re-honing to its lineup. Its website puts the nightly cleaning footprint at more than 46 million square feet.

Iacovino has spent 23 years working in the Philadelphia market specifically, after a longer career in the industry overall. “We clean probably 10 million square feet in Philadelphia, six million in high-rise commercial office space,” Iacovino said.

Benchmarking against the big players

Before the robots, there was a certification. Allan Industries holds ISSA’s CIMS designation, the Cleaning Industry Management Standard, including the Green Building add-on, and Strite said the process forced the company to reckon with a balancing act every midsize contractor knows.

“We want to have the customer service and the care that the small mom and pop can deliver, but we need the service delivery of a big multinational company. And it’s hard to wear both of those hats,” Strite said.

The CIMS process did two things for Allan, Strite said. It gave the company a way to measure itself against bigger competitors: “What are the big behemoths doing? What are they doing that we’re not doing that we could be doing better?” And it delivered what Vice President & Director of Client Partnerships  Janet Hall calls internal validation, Strite said.

“It was the first time that we’d ever had somebody come in and sort of poke around and see how [things worked],” Strite said. “It really helped us figure out where we needed to improve and where we were getting things right.”

For Iacovino’s Philadelphia operation specifically, the certification carried its own weight. “It’s really gratifying,” Iacovino said. “It was an important part of what we were doing.”

Why robots fit an aging workforce

The push toward automation started with a look at who was doing the work. “You have to consider the Philadelphia market is a very large market, and union employees have been around for a long time. You’ve got an aging workforce,” Iacovino said. “This is very repetitive work that they do every night, particularly when it’s vacuuming. If we could take some of that load off, that’s where the autonomous robots seem like they’re a very good fit for us.”

The math was straightforward, Iacovino said: “If somebody doesn’t have to push a 20-pound vacuum for eight hours a night, something else can do that.” Timing helped, too. The rollout landed as COVID-19 was emptying out commercial office buildings and tenants were giving back space, freeing cleaners to focus on other tasks while the machines covered open floor.

“We were lucky to have a very good partner that was willing to test the technology with us,” Iacovino said. “And when we rolled it out to the new site on Market Street, it was just a good fit. We can focus on so many other things rather than pushing a vacuum for eight hours a night.”

Winning over a skeptical union

Nobody at Allan Industries describes the union’s reaction as enthusiasm. “I’m not sure that willingness is the correct word,” Strite said. Before the Market Street building, the robots had only supplemented the crews, taking long hallways and common-area vacuuming off employees’ plates. Market Street marked the first site where the machines took over work employees used to do themselves.

Iacovino handled the introduction carefully, gathering employees together when the robots arrived on site and running a unit in front of them so they understood what they would be working around, Strite said. “Dave did something very, very smart,” Strite said.

The union’s wariness was not unique to robots, Strite said. “The union doesn’t like automation. Automation concerns them, whether it’s the use of cell phones or cell phone tracking or geofences in the buildings, or whether it’s equipment — even simple battery-powered equipment, not robots, just battery-powered vacuums,” Strite said. “I guess it’s fair to say they weren’t cheerleaders of this, but they got the point, and the willingness came over time, maybe begrudgingly.”

The workforce itself saw the machines differently than its union leadership did, Strite said. Allan’s Philadelphia cleaners are, on average, older than 50, about 10 years above the national average for the industry. “Pushing a vacuum cleaner really is not good for you ergonomically. And as much as the unions saw the existential threat of the automation, the cleaners themselves said, ‘Hey, I don’t like vacuuming,’” Strite said.

Attrition did the rest of the work. “We also still have attrition. People are retiring and people are leaving the workforce. So we didn’t have to lay anybody off,” Strite said. “The intent never was [to cut jobs], because these people have been in their buildings for 15 years. They have relationships with their tenants, and these are real people.”

What the machines actually do

The Market Street deployment runs on two kinds of equipment. “We have an autonomous auto scrubber, and we have autonomous vacuum cleaners,” Iacovino said.

Three vacuums combine for about nine hours of runtime per shift, against roughly eight hours for a typical cleaner, and together cover about 44,000 square feet of hallway a night, Iacovino said. The scrubber handles lobbies and long corridors that mix granite, ceramic and VCT flooring. Built-in sensors stop the equipment when someone comes within five feet, the same proximity safeguards familiar from grocery-store aisle robots, Iacovino said.

The pitch to clients follows the coverage numbers. “It’s not a difficult sell when I’m taking 44,000 square feet off your plate every night,” Iacovino said.

Getting there took some faith before the results arrived. “It was pretty much a leap of faith early on: Let’s test this out, let’s invest in it and see how it works. And it has,” Iacovino said. Having a client willing to test the equipment in a commercial office setting, rather than an airport or a mall, made the difference, he said.

The economics behind the decision

The rollout was not only about easing the load on an aging workforce, Strite said. “The reason we did it was process improvement, but also an ROI. We found a way that we could save some money, and at the end of the day, we’re spending our customers’ money, and they need to see savings,” Strite said.

Strite sees the approach translating to other cities, with one condition attached. “In the mature union town — a Boston, a New York, a Philadelphia, a Chicago — this would absolutely make sense,” Strite said. “It’s not going to make sense in a non-union, part-time marketplace. The robots are too expensive to do that.”

Questions still to answer

A customer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a 300,000-square-foot building has already expressed interest in the technology, Strite said, and the footprint fits. But every new site still comes down to a cost comparison. “We have to run the numbers to see what does a robot equal versus what a cleaner equals in total cost,” Strite said. “It’s not a matter of, I’m just going to buy a piece of equipment and use it. It’s consulting and talking and working things out with your clients.”

The industry has a long-standing norm that when a contractor loses an account, its cleaners stay on with the building. Robots complicate that assumption, Strite said. “Is the robot a piece of equipment, or is it an employee? Is it considered labor? Because it does produce some amount of labor — it covers labor hours every night. So who owns the robot? Who’s paying for the robot? And how do we treat the robot when it’s time to move on from an account?” Strite said.

Replacement cycles remain an open question, too. Allan Industries is still running its original fleet of robots, Strite said, with no clear sense yet of when the equipment will need to be replaced and the company will have to reinvest.

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