Case Study: Warehouse Cleaning Turnaround 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 had gone wrong

The previous contractor was, in effect, cleaning a warehouse like an office. Two cleaners with mops and a small walk-behind scrubber were expected to cover the whole slab in a three-hour visit. The arithmetic never worked, and the consequences compounded:

• Tyre marking and hydraulic film accumulated faster than it was removed, leaving a permanently grey slab that photographed badly in audit reports
• Racking uprights and beams had never been dusted — visible fibre and dust build-up at height, which the client auditor treated as a contamination risk
• Dock aprons carried shrink-wrap fragments, strapping and grease, creating both a housekeeping finding and a genuine slip hazard
• The mezzanine office and driver amenities were cleaned last with whatever time remained, which was usually none

The program we built

The fix was to stop buying hours and start buying machine time. We separated the work 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 priced within our standard Lidcombe warehouse band of $35 to $48 per hour, fixed as a monthly figure roughly 22 percent above the failing contract. The restorative weekends and first high-bay dust were quoted separately as one-off projects. Terms were month-to-month with 30 days notice, as with every agreement — the client was not asked to commit to a term to get the improvement. Comparable numbers are set out on our Lidcombe cost guide and rates page.

The result

The site passed its client standards re-audit in week nine with no floor or racking findings recorded. Dock slip incident reports fell to zero across the two quarters that followed. The operator subsequently added a second facility in the corridor to the same agreement at portfolio pricing. 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.

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