A floor audit at Medica Superspecialty

Medica Superspecialty asked us to look at their corridors because the shine was going flat about three weeks after every restoration. The assumption on site was that the maintainer was wrong. It wasn't.

What we measured

We walked 4,200 m² of vinyl across four floors and took gloss readings at fifteen fixed points, then repeated them weekly for a month. We also sat in on two night shifts to watch what actually happens, which is usually where the answer is.

Gloss held for eight to ten days and then dropped sharply — not gradually. A gradual decline is wear. A cliff is chemistry.

What was going on

Two things, compounding. The daily cleaner was being dosed by eye at roughly double the labelled rate, which left a surfactant film that dulled on drying. And the scrubbing pass was running the same route every night, so the traffic lanes were being worked hard while the edges were barely touched. The edges looked fine. The lanes went matt on a fortnightly cycle and pulled the average down.

Over-dosing is the most common thing we find and the least likely to be reported, because it feels like diligence. More product, cleaner floor. It is not how the chemistry works: past the labelled concentration you are adding residue, not cleaning power.

What changed

We fitted dosing pumps calibrated to the canister and put a bilingual wall chart in the utility room, so the labelled dose is the dose. We split the scrubbing route into two alternating patterns so the lanes get a rest night. And we moved the restoration cycle from a fixed calendar date to a gloss threshold, which means it happens when the floor needs it rather than when the diary says so.

Three months on, gloss holds within tolerance for six to seven weeks and consumption is down about a fifth. The floor did not need a better product. It needed the product it already had, dosed correctly and routed sensibly.