Dr Ilham Kadri, President, Diversey Care – VP and Officer, SealedAir
As innovations in cleaning reach new heights, equipment manufacturers have ventured to the most advanced cleaning in systems using robots. Dr Ilham Kadri, President, Diversey Care – VP and Officer, SealedAir in an exclusive interview with Mohana M speaks on the award winning sci-fi turned reality that could revolutionise the whole cleaning methodology. Excerpts:
Diversey won two awards – Amsterdam Award for Augmented Reality for the best innovation in its category and the overall Innovation Award of the year. Please share your feeling at this juncture?
We are honoured to receive the ISSA Interclean awards, which is like winning an ‘Oscar’ and that too in two categories – one for ‘Augmented Reality’, a disruptive technology applied for cleaning and hygiene, and another for the best innovation. My team deserves the award for all the hard work put in for more than three years listening to global and regional customers and then developing the right solutions to resolve their pain points and respond to their needs.
[box type=”shadow” ]The reason behind acquiring Intellibot is the artificial intelligence. We wanted a machine, which can map a volume by itself and that can learn and re-learn. We are extremely proud of having Intellibot in our portfolio. [/box]
Intelli consult, Intelli flow, Intellibot, Robotics… What is the intelligence behind the ‘Intelli’ concept?
I am extremely dogmatic about bringing more intelligence in the way we do cleaning. First of all, the cleaning industry is the second biggest employer after the government authorities. We believe that this industry employs more than 800 million cleaners with 70% of them being either illiterate or who do not speak their native language. Apart from the few who wanted to remain with the cleaning industry, the majority of the rest have left after finding another job. The industry is facing 70% turnover in human capital which is self-explanatory.
Hence, it is necessary to build the pride in our industry and restore the value of clean. The problem with cleaning is that it is invisible. One can see it when it gets dirty and therefore, it is too late. We want to turn this invisible into visible and honour our invisible heroes – ‘the cleaners’. They are not just cleaning our floor or toilet, they are actually saving our lives. As per statistics, one in 16 in the US is subjected to food poisoning. The foremost reason of food poisoning is lack of hand hygiene. For example, one enters the hospital thinking it is safe and yet catches infection or disease. This is what we call hospital acquired infection (HAI) which is costing the US economy $33 billion and Europe $16 billion every year. Putting all this together, we believed that there is a need to bring more intelligence into the cleaning space and make our cleaners connected with cleaning machines. Intelligent machines have dispensers fitted with chips which tell us the soap levels, water consumption, energy intake, resources consumption and so on. It is intelligent and equipped with GPS to detect obstructions and this way we can manage fleets of our customers.
The reason behind acquiring Intellibot is the artificial intelligence. We wanted a machine, which can map out the environment by itself and that can learn and re-learn. We are extremely proud of having Intellibot in our portfolio. It is a technology, which can save up to 75% of water and energy, make a difference where you have scarcity of cleaning resources or where the dollar per hour cost of cleaning reaches to $20 to $30 like in Australia, New York or Switzerland or Amsterdam and the return on investment (ROI) is less than 12 months.
