ES Optimizer users have a goldmine of data about their facilities at their fingertips. But, how do you get the most out of that data for your Environmental Services Department?

ES Opti­miz­er is a pow­er­ful data­base that man­ages key infor­ma­tion about the space in your facil­i­ty, its clean­ing require­ments, and the hours required to main­tain it.

With hun­dreds of facil­i­ties using ES Opti­miz­er, we have over 700 mil­lion square feet of space logged in the ES Opti­miz­er data­base. A typ­i­cal ES Opti­miz­er facil­i­ty has 730,000 square feet and 250 staffed beds. For each clean­able space (AKA “room”) in your ES Opti­miz­er data­base, you can see:

  • square footage
  • floor type
  • num­ber of fix­tures (such as sinks and show­ers)
  • room type
  • clean­ing steps
  • clean­ing fre­quen­cy
  • clean­ing time

Below, we’ll talk about just some of the ways to use your data to dras­ti­cal­ly reduce the time you spend man­ag­ing EVS oper­a­tions.


Calculating Staffing Requirements

Full Staffing Analysis

ES Opti­miz­er is most well known for cal­cu­lat­ing the FTE (Full-Time Equiv­a­lent) require­ments based on real facil­i­ty data when it is first set up for your facil­i­ty. You’ll know every detail from what your total bud­get is down to what each EVS Tech will be doing.

Calculating FTEs for Project Work

Since project work does not hap­pen on a dai­ly basis, it can be hard to esti­mate the time need­ed for it along­side the dai­ly assign­ments. With­out good data, plan­ning for project work involves a lot of guess­work, which often results in you drop­ping sched­uled work to put out fires.

In the ES Opti­miz­er data­base, project work is auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed for a room based on its room type (view the Peri­od­ic Plan­ning Work­sheet). So, you can cal­cu­late the time need­ed to cov­er all project work across all rooms and be able to put the right EVS techs in place ahead of time to accom­plish it with Peri­od­ic Assign­ments.

These two steps above are typ­i­cal­ly the actions you take when you first get ES Opti­miz­er. But, you can also go back to your ES Opti­miz­er data again and again to cal­cu­late pro­posed changes in your staffing, like:

  1. Mak­ing a case for switch­ing floor types:
    Hard fin­ish floors gen­er­al­ly require more annu­al hours to main­tain than car­pet or a non-fin­ish floor.  Using your ES Opti­miz­er data, you can run “What-If” sce­nar­ios using dif­fer­ent floor types to see the dif­fer­ence in annu­al main­te­nance hours.
  2. Esti­mat­ing FTEs in the face of sud­den changes in require­ments:
    Dur­ing COVID, many facil­i­ties had to add a sec­ond clean to patient rooms and increase iso­la­tion cleans, both of which increased labor needs. Again, you can call on your facil­i­ty data to cal­cu­late the impact these changes will have on your depart­ment, by cal­cu­lat­ing the addi­tion­al hours need­ed to meet them. If you are for­tu­nate enough to be able to sup­ple­ment your staff, you can increase the ser­vice lev­el in your pub­lic areas and hire the right num­ber of peo­ple and know where to put them. But if, like many depart­ments, it isn’t an option to sim­ply add staff, you can use your data to deter­mine how much time you need to shift away from less crit­i­cal work in order to meet the new require­ments.
  3. Fore­cast­ing FTEs for new build­ings:
    ES Opti­miz­er Staffing Analy­sis is not just for your exist­ing space. You can also use it to project FTEs need­ed for new spaces, like new build­ings on cam­pus or new clin­ics through­out the com­mu­ni­ty. Once the data is entered in ES Opti­miz­er, you won’t have to guess: you’ll know exact­ly what it will take to clean the new space based on your cur­rent pro­gram used on the rest of your cam­pus.

Setting the Right Expectations

No one under­stands your department’s needs bet­ter than you do. But, how do you com­mu­ni­cate those needs to peo­ple less famil­iar with the ins and outs of EVS work? Here are some exam­ples of how you can use your ES Opti­miz­er data to help you set expec­ta­tions:

Requests to Reduce Your Overall Budget

If you are tasked with a reduc­tion in staffing dur­ing bud­get sea­son, ES Opti­miz­er can help you set expec­ta­tions of ser­vice that will be pro­vid­ed.

Dif­fer­ent lev­els of clean come with dif­fer­ent FTE require­ments: whether it’s Trash and Grab, Stan­dard or Pre­mi­um. You can use your data to show exact­ly which ser­vices will be reduced and in which areas of the hos­pi­tal, down to the fre­quen­cy of office clean­ing. View the Rooms Affect­ed — What If Report here.

Illustrating the Real-World Impact of Outside Recommendations

When con­sul­tants less famil­iar with envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices sug­gest changes to your EVS pro­gram, they need your detailed feed­back. For instance, if FTE require­ments are pro­posed based on com­par­ing your facil­i­ty to anoth­er of sim­i­lar square footage, you can find the data that helps them under­stand your facility’s require­ments vs. anoth­er facility’s, beyond just square footage, such as:

  1. Per­cent of Clin­i­cal Space vs. Non-Clin­i­cal
  2. Vol­ume through the OR and ER
  3. Amount of office space vs. high-traf­fic cor­ri­dors
  4. Clean­able square footage vs. Total square footage — Some square footages include park­ing garages, which EVS does not typ­i­cal­ly clean.

View the Square Feet by Room Type Report 

As you know, these are the details that tru­ly deter­mine clean­ing require­ments.


Price Out Supplies for Projects

With your ES Opti­miz­er data, under­stand­ing the cost of a new project doesn’t have to be a guess­ing game. You can price out exact­ly what it costs to get what you need for projects like:

Replacing Cubicle Curtains

If you want to switch from reusable cubi­cle cur­tains to dis­pos­able, there is a fea­ture in each room in the data­base where you can input the num­ber of cur­tains in a room. With this data, you can run a report to deter­mine the amount of cubi­cle cur­tains need­ed and the ongo­ing finan­cial impact of this switch.

Calculating the Coverage Area for Floor Finish

If you’re get­ting ready to refin­ish your floors, you can run a report to show the amount of hard-sur­face square footage in your facil­i­ty to deter­mine how many gal­lons of floor fin­ish you’ll need. View the Build­ings Square Feet by Floor Type report here

Estimating Paper Towel Dispensers in Public Restrooms

You can use ES Opti­miz­er reports to pull the num­ber of pub­lic restrooms in your facil­i­ty, along with their square footage num­ber. You will esti­mate the num­ber of dis­pensers in each restroom based on their size.

Procuring Equipment that Best Fits the Size of Facility

Using your data, you can pro­vide your ven­dors with the total square footage of hard-sur­face floors or car­pet­ed cor­ri­dors in your facil­i­ty, which they can use to rec­om­mend the prop­er piece of equip­ment that would be the most effi­cient for your facil­i­ty. For instance, if you only have 10,000 square feet of car­pet­ed cor­ri­dors, you’re prob­a­bly not going to need the largest, most pow­er­ful car­pet extrac­tor, and your ven­dor can make a more appro­pri­ate rec­om­men­da­tion based on that data.


As EVS Teams are responsible for hundreds of thousands of tasks, your facility data is the foundation for work assignments, scheduling, quality management and so much more. These are just some of the ways you can use your ES Optimizer data to expedite your work, set priorities, reach department goals, and handle any emergencies that come up.

For more ideas on how to use your data, you can call us any­time at 800–260-8665, ext. 8 or email info@smartfacilitysoftware.com.


Not an ES Optimizer customer yet?

Call us at 800–260-8665 ext. 1, email jmowrey@smartfacilitysoftware.com or sched­ule a demo with us today.