Every cleaning operation, whether it is one woman with a bucket or a crew servicing an office block, runs on a supply chain of four quite different things – and the reason so many run short of the wrong item at the worst possible moment is that all four get scribbled onto a single shopping list. Chemicals, equipment, consumables and protective wear are each bought on a different logic, and telling them apart is most of what good procurement actually is.

Botswana now has a wider local base to buy from than it did. Established suppliers such as Chemdol stock cleaning chemicals alongside personal protective equipment and safety accessories, and a wave of local manufacturers has entered the market – from Jemmie Golekanye’s Francistown washing powder, profiled by Mmegi, to Pinbelly Elite, the Selebi Phikwe detergent maker built by four women. Government has also directed procuring entities to favour locally made goods where they can. The choice is broader; the risk is treating four categories as though they were one.

1. Chemicals – bought per job, matched to the surface

Chemicals are consumed every time they are used, so they are a recurring cost, and they are the category where buying blind does the most damage. The useful split is by chemistry and job: an alkaline degreaser for grease, a mild acid descaler for the limescale that hard Botswana water leaves on taps and glass, a disinfectant for bathrooms and food areas, and a neutral cleaner for sealed stone and finished floors. The national standard for liquid detergents, BOS 111:2015, classifies these products by the surfaces they are meant for, which is a good reminder to buy the same way. Prefer concentrates over ready-to-use bottles where you can, because you are otherwise paying to transport water, and keep the dilution ratios and safety data where the person doing the work can actually see them. Buying from a local maker, such as those now operating in Francistown and Selebi Phikwe, can also shorten lead times and cut the cost of freighting heavy liquids across the border.

2. Equipment – bought once, maintained for years

Equipment is capital, not consumption. Mops and buckets, microfibre cloths, a decent vacuum, a floor buffer for larger contracts, a trolley, ladders – these are bought occasionally, they wear out slowly, and they reward maintenance. The mistake is to treat them like consumables and buy the cheapest version repeatedly, or to treat consumables like equipment and hoard them. Two disciplines pay off immediately: colour-code cloths and mops by area, so the cloth that cleaned a toilet never touches a kitchen counter, and service the machines, because a neglected vacuum motor is a far bigger loss than the filter it needed.

3. Consumables – bought continuously, tracked by burn rate

Consumables are the low-value, high-frequency items that quietly keep a job running: bin liners, paper towel, toilet paper, single-use gloves, sponges and cleaning cloths. In a commercial contract many of these are supplied to the client and effectively passed through, so they need to be priced into the quote rather than absorbed. The whole skill here is tracking the burn rate and setting a reorder point, because running out of bin liners in front of a client costs far more in credibility than the liners ever cost to buy. A simple par level – reorder when stock drops to a week’s supply – solves most of it, and keeping a small buffer of the fastest-moving items is far cheaper than an emergency trip to the wholesaler that idles a whole crew over a missing three-pula item.

4. Uniforms and protection – the category most often skipped

Protective wear is the category people leave off the list until something goes wrong. Gloves that stand up to the chemicals in use, an apron, eye protection when decanting concentrates, a mask for dusty or fume-heavy work and proper closed shoes are not optional extras; they are what keeps the person doing the work healthy and keeps whoever engaged her clear of liability. Suppliers such as Chemdol carry this alongside their chemicals for exactly that reason. A uniform belongs in the same category, for a plainer purpose – it signals that this is professional work by an identifiable person, which is worth something at a client’s front door.

Separate the four and procurement changes shape. Capital gets budgeted once and maintained; chemicals get matched to jobs and bought in concentrate; consumables get reordered before they run out rather than after; and protection stops being an afterthought. You stop over-buying durable kit you already own and under-buying the cheap things whose absence actually stops the job. It also makes quoting honest, because you can see which costs recur every month and which do not.

This is the same four-part logic a client meets on the supply side of Kleana, whose shop lists cleaning products and equipment rather than lumping everything under one heading – chemicals in one place, the durable kit in another. Reading a supply list that is already sorted this way is a quiet lesson in how to buy: the categories are separate because they behave differently.

So build the kit systematically rather than in a panic on a Friday afternoon. Draw the four lists – chemicals, equipment, consumables, protection – mark each item as one-time or recurring, and buy to the job in front of you rather than to whatever is on the shelf. An operation that knows which of its costs come back every month, and which do not, is one that can be priced, and a cleaning business that cannot price itself is not really a business yet.

Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa