Scoping a Warehouse Floor Program on the M4 Corridor, Lidcombe

The site

Six dock doors, selective racking to roughly eight metres, a 260 square metre mezzanine office, a driver amenities block and a hardstand yard shared with two neighbouring tenancies. Two shifts, six days a week, with inbound containers arriving from early morning and outbound freight loading late. Nothing about the operation left a convenient window in which the floor sat empty.

What usually goes wrong

The contract we replace is, in effect, a warehouse cleaned like an office — two cleaners with mops and a small walk-behind scrubber expected to cover the whole slab in a three-hour visit. The arithmetic never works, and the consequences compound:

• Tyre marking and hydraulic film accumulate faster than they are removed, leaving a permanently grey slab that photographs badly in audit reports
• Racking uprights and beams never get dusted — visible fibre and dust build-up at height, which client auditors treat as a contamination risk
• Dock aprons carry shrink-wrap fragments, strapping and grease, creating both a housekeeping finding and a genuine slip hazard
• The mezzanine office and driver amenities get cleaned last with whatever time remains, which is usually none

The program we build

The fix is to stop buying hours and start buying machine time. The work separates into a restorative phase and an ongoing phase:

• Restorative: two consecutive weekends of ride-on scrubbing with an aggressive pad and degreaser to lift the accumulated film, plus a full first-pass high-bay vacuum dust of racking and beams
• Ongoing floor: ride-on scrubbing of the full slab twice weekly, worked zone by zone with signage so live pick faces stayed open under the site traffic management plan
• Ongoing height: quarterly vacuum dusting of racking, beams and ledges with reach poles
• Docks and yard: monthly pressure washing of aprons, leveller pits and roller-door tracks, with grease spotting treated at source rather than spread
• Mezzanine and amenities: a nightly office-grade scope with high-touch disinfection, bathroom restocking and a signed checklist — deliberately ring-fenced so it could never be sacrificed to finish the floor

Cost and terms

The ongoing program prices within our standard Lidcombe warehouse band of $35 to $48 per hour, fixed as a monthly figure, with the restorative weekends and first high-bay dust quoted separately as one-off projects. Machine time costs more than mop hours, and we quote both so the difference in covered area is visible. Terms are month to month with 30 days notice — nobody is asked to commit to a term to get the improvement. Comparable numbers are set out on our Lidcombe cost guide and rates page.

What the operator gets in writing

A scope that names the machine and the frequency for every surface rather than a lump of hours; a documented restorative phase quoted separately from the ongoing program; a quarterly high-bay dusting record; and a mezzanine and amenities scope ring-fenced so it can never be sacrificed to finish the floor. Crews are inducted on the site traffic management plan, police-checked and directly employed, with $20 million public liability cover and certificates of currency supplied on request. We do not claim an audit outcome — that is the auditor decision. The full scope is described on our warehouse cleaning Lidcombe page, with process and plant environments covered under industrial cleaning and the equivalent large-format work at Chullora.

Questions about this scope