Adjusting his prescription safety glasses, ”Prof.” Marcel DeMuynck waves his students to stand a safe distance behind him and cautions them:
”Don`t look directly at the explosion. If the school blows up, run towards the parking lot.” Then, grinning with the diabolically detached grin of an academician, DeMuynck, an expert on accidental chemical interactions that result in plant disasters, pours a jigger of magnesium onto a pool of sodium chlorate on a lab table and steps back. A yellow flash erupts and then sizzles into smoke.
With that, another class of 70 gets its freshman initiation into a three- day course in industrial cleaning and maintenance at General Motors` new
”Scrub University.”
So far, all the students who have gone through the course are GM employees, but Scrub U`s doors (which lead into hallways and floors covered with a variety of carpets and tiles used to demonstrate various cleaning techniques) are beginning to open a bit for outsiders, too. Industrial cleaning is a multibillion-dollar industry; GM alone spends $500 million a year on what has become a specialized art and science. For every car it manufactures, the company spends $100 on cleaning both the car and the plant in which it is made. ”Our objective,” says school director Bob Price, ”is basically American and basically GM: to become more efficient at cleaning and thus save money.”
In 1981 the GM management, aware that cleaner plants produce better products, asked Price, then a GM automotive engineer, to analyze the main problems hampering cleaning operations throughout the company. These problems he identified as:
— Lack of specialized training for cleaning personnel.
— Cleaning personnel who didn`t feel ”really” a part of the company.
— The need for more effective and pretested cleaning products.
— Cleaning operations in need of better organization.
GM responded to Price`s analysis by founding Scrub U. ”Some companies would have fired a guy for a report like that,” says an associate.
Scrub U–its formal name is the GM Industrial Cleaning Technology Center
(ICTC)–is in Troy, Mich., and began operations last May. It is the brainchild of Price, 51, and two industrial-cleaning experts: Pam Cheatham, 35, who left her Dearborn, Mich., industrial-cleaning company to join the center, and Oscar W. Koeppel, 60, a native of Algonquin, Ill., and a generally acknowledged guru of the industrial cleaning industry who sold his cleaning business to Beatrice Foods to join GM.
The trio drew the basic plan for the center`s 25,000-square-foot building on the back of an envelope, and GM`s board of directors, seeing a novel way to cut cleaning costs, began making the sketch come alive in 1983.
The techniques being taught at Scrub U have been tested for several years at various GM-affiliated companies, and Koeppel, as the school`s technical director, has put together a curriculum that passed tough tests in a number of real situations and then was fine-tuned at nearby Macomb College before the Tech Center program officially opened.
As director, Price loves to take visitors through his tricky building, which is laid out like a board game. On the floor are squares of many different colors and materials, from carpeting to chemical-resistant urethane. Red, yellow, green and blue machines, looking like cousins of R2D2, growl as they move around on rechargeable batteries, their snouts fitted with colorful polishing disks (”The darker the color, the more aggressive the pad,”
Koeppel tells the class).
Before entering the building, students have to walk across shoe-sole-cleaning mats designed by the 3M Company. Enroute to the classrooms, they trek over three different kinds of carpeting, four varieties of hard flooring that are coated and maintained in different ways, and then over several slabs of marble, which Koeppel calls ”islands of misery.” Marble, despite its reputation for durability, scratches easily and requires a lot of maintenance with something he derisively calls ”tombstone cleaner.” Wood blocks set on end are much better for floors under heavy equipment. ”If one block splinters, you just replace it,” says Price. A new polycrete resin floor, capable of supporting 25,000 pounds per square inch, has done well in its tests and will probably be used for flooring in the new GM Saturn plants.
Cheatham picked eight different shades and varieties of floor tile–plus four different grouting colors. ”Students quickly discover,” she has written, ”that they must not get the tile clean and leave the grouting looking tacky.” ”Total clean” is the goal in floorwork. GM spends 60 percent of its cleaning dollars on the floors, says Price.
Restrooms with toilets mounted on the wall and fully tiled walls are much easier to maintain than those with toilets on the floor and walls tiled only up to a certain level.
Price waves at the class in the brightly lit main teaching area. Called the ”board game room” because of its floor design, the ”classroom” is large enough to hold four basketball courts. All around are various kinds of cleaning and polishing machines along with robots and other machines waiting to be cleaned. In the class are cleaners (the new term for janitors), factory sweepers, housekeepers, general supervisors, plant engineers, training personnel, industrial
engineers and purchasing agents.
A growing number of GM staffers from overseas are also coming to the center, people such as Mike Kolul, a native of Czechoslovakia whose work for the company takes him to Europe, Australia, Indonesia and South America. The notes he takes as a student at Scrub U. will undoubtedly resonate in technical memos across GM`s operations overseas. He smiles appreciatively as Koeppel demonstrates rug shampooing to the class. ”I like the circular patterns,”
Koeppel says. ”But make sure everyone knows that these beautiful whorls come from using too much soap and indicate over-shampooing. Most housekeepers and professionals use too much soap.”
”Manufacturers have fallen all over themselves to donate cleaning machines and materials to the school,” says one faculty member. ”They send their best machines and gadgets and hope GM will buy a thousand of them.”
Koeppel waves at the class, now chuckling at the news that the best way to clean a robot welder is with a common household cleanser in a spray bottle and a terry-cloth rag. (Manmade chemically based cleaning rags are eschewed for their non-absorbency.) ”Next month we`re getting our first class of 11 plant managers from all over the world. They`ll ask tough questions, but that`s what a university is for,” says Price.
These plant managers, overseers of some 3,000 GM structures across the world (some of them encompassing 100 acres under one roof) and the 700,000 people working in them will arrive at Scrub U with pocket calculators and computers ready to communicate directly with their home bases.
About 13,000 GM employees are directly engaged in cleaning activities. Their average wage is around $12 an hour. Neither GM nor the unions want help from commercial cleaning companies. ”It`s GM`s fourth-highest cost area,”
says Bob Finta, manager of Advanced Manfacturing Engineering, the company unit that directly oversees Scrub U`s operations. He uses the buzz words now heard quite often at Scrub U: ”Every car we sell has a $100 cleaning cost in its price. ICTC hs already begun to shave real money off this figure, money that can help us compete better.”
Koeppel brings up a statistic compiled by the International Sanitary Supply Association: For every $100 a company spends on materials, an average of $19 is spent on cleaning. There are lots of American companies that can profit from a clean-up of the kind pioneered at Scrub U.
In the classroom, where a humorous training film shows him in a red jumpsuit and wearing goggles with windshield wipers, Koeppel picks up the theme of grime and punishment. ”Grime is embedded dirt,” he says.
”Punishment is what it does to floor surfaces when ground in with work shoes. . . The Saturn will reap a lot of gains from stuff we`ve learned here. We`ve found that in a simple, small four-story building a cleaner using a 5-foot dust mop instead of a 3-footer could save himself three miles of walking a day. That`s a lot of saving at 12 bucks an hour.”
There have been some criticisms of the center as built by GM engineers:
The ”scuffing areas” are too close together, the classrooms are too small, there are not enough walls. But Price shrugs them off diplomatically. ”We`ve made a helluva start,” he says. We`ve already learned, for instance, that our test-painting booths should have been more extensive.” From his sigh and smile one can see that he`s already thinking of future improvements at the center.
Ford Motor Co. maintenance-control engineer says, ”GM`s doing a terrific job of getting all their cleaning knowledge together under one roof. At Ford we naturally recognize the relationship between a clean plant and a quality product. Our main question about Scrub U is cost effectiveness. There are hundreds of good outside cleaning firms available. Would they be cheaper or better? I don`t know if Scrub U can answer those questions.”
Irv Otis, American Motors` manager of industrial engineering, is more sanguine. ”Bob Price was one of my star students at the University of Detroit,” he says. ”He always had this dream of methodizing everything. So what he`s done at Scrub U is standardize the industry`s cleaning knowledge. What do I think of the school?” He laughs. ”We`ve just signed up 12 of our people for the October class.”
Because 60 percent of cleaning costs is spent on floors, the staff is big on shampooing rather than scrubbing carpets; scrubbing embeds the dirt. Hard floors that need waxing are out. Zinc-based tiles and nonflammable and water-cleanable materials are in. So are good anti-slip coefficients, resistance to foot traffic, thermal coatings, high-speed floor polishers.
For windows, Scrub U swears by the simple squeegee and dash of ammonia or commercial window-cleaning agent, and terry-cloth rags for very dirty windows. ”If you use water on very dirty glass,” says Koeppel, ”you`re starting out with mud. Dirt and water make mud. Ask any kid.”
Students fill their notebooks with Scrub U data, such as the five kinds of dirt: petroleum-based (greases and tars), animal fats (kitchen stains around stoves), carbonized stains (cigarette and other smoke), nature stains
(dirt, grass stains, germs) and odors.
The remedies are usually combinations of: acetones, peroxide, ammonia, vinegar (for lipstick and lots of other stains), paint thinners, soda water, plain water.
And always, safety. The purpose of the introductory explosion, Koeppel explains, is to warn against so-called spontaneous explosions and fires in untidy janitorial closets. ”God, how we hate them when they get cluttered.” A growing concern for plant safety–further heightened by the recent conviction for murder of an Illinois company`s top officials for the death of a worker who was exposed to cyanide without being told he was working with the highly toxic chemical or given the necessary training and equipment to handle it safely–has brought on a flurry of ”right to know” laws requiring that workers be informed about dangerous materials or situations that they might be exposed to at the workplace. On Nov. 25, Koeppel tells his class, the federal Hazards Communication Standard Act takes effect, superseding similar state laws, including those now in force in Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts and other states.
This new law spells out the responsibility of manufacturers to label their materials clearly, point out risks and train employees in the proper handling of dangerous chemicals. Koeppel tells the class of two little-noted consequences of the new law: a) that the required labeling procedures would mean ”all manufacturing trade secrets will be up for grabs,” and b) that
”if someone comes to any factory, big or small, and demonstrates a cleaning procedure using a chemical, it becomes the legal responsibility of the host company to make a record of the use of that chemical–and keep that record for the next 30 years, so that someone then at the plant who develops, say, pancreatic cancer 22 years later will be able to prove he got it the day of the demonstration.”
The mood of the class turns somber. Cleaning has become serious business, going beyond just dollars and cents. Koeppel posits a case: A cleaner has coffee in his little junk room. Several open bottles of cleanser might be on the shelves. Steam from the coffee wafts into these bottles and causes chemical changes, possibly dangerous ones. The chemicals exude their own aura and go into the guy`s coffee.” The litigious possibilities form in the minds of the students like unwelcome clouds of dust.
Brendan Wagner, a 22-year-old instructor from Macomb College, suits up and dons safety shoes, then demonstrates GM`s new 10,000-rpm blasting gun that can shoot a stream of water at 33 gallons a minute. This water acts as a knife capable of cutting inch-thick plywood and (with some models) steel. Here it is being used to knock off accumulated grease from an engine cradle. All solvents and detergents have been useless against the black accretions that look like they came from another planet, but under this water gun, all the goo literally goes down the drain.
Price proudly displays three letters, the kind of letters any good university gets when its prize project becomes known. Never mind the ones from Ford and Chrysler, but the third letter, signed by one Robert J. Bengtsson, says: ”As director of (subway) car appearance at the New York City Transit Authority, I am particularly interested in your high-pressure cleaning system that uses water only. . . .”
”It`s for their graffiti,” says one instructor reading over a visitor`s shoulder.
”If we could get enough room and a good water supply,” dreams young, eager Brendan Wagner, ”and could strip down the graffiti . . . .”
”You`d need a lot of other chemicals,” Koeppel warns. ”But it may someday be worth a try.” He pauses.
”You can clean any spot,” he says. ”But stains are harder. The difference is time. Time, temperature. Of course, we`re using enzymes to eat spots. There`s pepsin . . . .”
And what could Oscar Koeppel have done for Lady Macbeth`s ”damned spot?”
He thinks for a moment, then says, ”As I recall, hers was a psychological spot brought about by her guilt over Duncan`s or Banquo`s murder. Too bad Pam Cheatham isn`t here today. She`d tell you how to remove real blood–detergent, blotting, something like ammonia. Lots of water. On the skin, water should be enough. On other surfaces, peroxide and rust remover.” ”Pam would deal with the psychological spot, too,” says Price. ”She`s the one who keeps reminding us that we have to keep this place just dirty enough for students to learn to clean and just clean enough so we can stand it ourselves.”
