Hand sanitizer and soap dispensers have become ubiquitous. When you walk into a hospital, restaurant, airport, stadium, mall, or office building, hand sanitizer is welcoming you with an invitation to clean your hands as you transition into the facility. In fact, 84% of people expect hand sanitizer to be offered in public places.* Business owners and facility operators began offering hand sanitizer to help make their patrons, employees, and guests feel safe while they’re visiting.
But as part of this new normal, those new hand hygiene dispensers need maintained. Batteries die at different intervals and certain dispensers placed in high-traffic locations may need new refills sooner than lower traffic areas of the facility. We’ve all experienced that feeling of disappointment when you reach for a dispenser only to find that it didn’t work or was empty. That experience may have left you with a poor impression of the facility or business you were frequenting, so it’s in a business’s best interests to keep dispensers operational.
The nationwide labor shortage is compounding the challenge of keeping dispensers working. Businesses are relying on their service teams to make a judgement call on when to change a refill. Change it too soon and you create waste. Wait too long to change it and risk a complaint. Smart dispensers that can communicate usage and alerts enable service teams to do their jobs better and more efficiently to avoid a customer complaint or poor experience.
What is a smart dispenser?
A smart hand hygiene dispenser is an example of The Internet of Things (IoT), which is a network of sensors connected to the Internet with the purpose of delivering useful information and data. Smart dispensers have communication devices installed inside of them to track usage and detect issues before or as they are happening. Using technology like Wi-Fi or Cellular, the dispenser sends the data to a gateway onsite or in the cloud for processing. Data is turned into insightful information that helps cleaners and maintenance crews make better decisions about when to service the dispensers. This shift from manual decision-making to data-driven decision-making, has enabled many teams to become more efficient and do more with less resources.
What are some examples?
- Hospitals are turning to technology and smart dispensers not only to monitor nurses and doctors hand hygiene compliance to protocols, but service teams are using data to limit the number of trips needed to the stock room for soap and sanitizer refills, saving labor costs, and minimizing waste.
- Airports are placing smart dispensers at busy areas along the travel ribbon like after TSA Security checkpoints, near food courts, and at gates, and since some of these dispensers are going through a refill every other day, usage data is being used to predict outages before they happen.
- Restaurants use smart dispensers to track employee usage and provide patrons with products for use just before consuming food – helping to maintain their safe and clean image.
- College campuses that are spread out across hundreds of acres use the smart dispenser data to drive efficiency for supply distribution among buildings and inventory management and replenishment.
A smart solution: PURELL SMARTLINK™ Electronic Monitoring Solutions and Service Alerts
GOJO is a leader in the smart dispenser category with 10 years of experience. We have the knowledge and deep market insights to deliver solutions that help to save lives and make life better through our well-being solutions.
PURELL SMARTLINK™ Service Alerts is a proactive and preventative maintenance system to monitor your hand hygiene dispenser fleet with data to increase labor efficiency and productivity – and can be applied to PURELL® dispensing systems in any type of business or facility.
- Predictive analytics based on historical usage determine the estimated date to empty for precise servicing and reduced product waste.
- Usage and trend data to help keep the right number of supplies in the stock room, improve workflows and increased inventory ordering accuracy.
- Real-Time Monitoring of refill levels, battery statuses, and expiration information with alerts that tell you about a problem before anyone else does.
- Integration with PURELL® Touch-Free state-of-the-art dispensing technology, engineered with attention to design, sustainability, and functionality.
- Security by Design to protect against vulnerabilities.
When you adopt PURELL SMARTLINK™ Technologies, you also get the benefit of hand hygiene products from the #1 brand of hand sanitizer in hospitals. 1
For more information, visit GOJO.com/Electronic-Monitoring-Systems. For a free trial or to learn more about the PURELL SMARTLINK Technology and Services, please complete this form.