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Meeting Maintenance Standards in Mall Management

by Admin
0 comment

Design Challenges

” If the mall is well designed and if the housekeeping staff and the products that they use are the best, then the cleaning systems become sustainable and more effective,” says Jonathan Yach, CEO, Mantri Square, Bangalore.

A well designed mall with consistent best practices can be kept clean. It is very difficult to clean something that cannot be cleaned. If the mall has a beautiful ceramic or marble floor and the walls are painted; the paint should be such that it can be washed. These are very important design elements to be considered if the mall is to be kept clean.

On a monthly basis 1.4 million customers visit the shopping centre. If it rains or, when there is an important cricket match on in the city, less people tend to visit the mall. Whatever the inflow of people, the mall has to be managed. The message here is ‘design a mall well and fit it with robust equipment and finishes’. This starts with employing an architect who understands mall interiors. Often architects make mistakes from a shopping centre point of view. They do not understand the rotation, circulation, vertical reticulation, the impact on the people within the shopping centre and most importantly they don’t understand how big and wide corridors need to be and how many toilets there should be in a mall. The Mantri Square Shopping Mall has been designed to accommodate nearly a 100,000 people a day! We have handled a 120,000 people a day in our early days. We know that this mall can quite comfortably handle 120,000 shoppers.

The interiors within should be manageable. Like a table mustn’t be made out of plastic, it must be made of a hard wearing material like steel or fresh stone. Similarly, the floor has to be a hard ceramic or marble and granite. It has to be cleanable and cannot be just architecturally beautiful. In other words, if plastic is used, it will break and require frequent replacement. Invest in the best up front; get it well designed and as a result it will save a lot of money going forth. A lot of developers fall into the trap of using cheap and poor products in the design & execution and one gets stuck with problems for years thereafter.

The interiors should be such that one must be able to be clean it regularly with soap and water. The finishes should be universal – of easily cleanable and maintainable structure and form. This mall is spotlessly clean and floors shining in the morning. It is constantly wiped and kept clean during the day as people walk in and out. By the end of the evening, floors tend to lose a bit of its lustre, which is restored the next day with a quick wipe, clean and buff. The specialized deep cleaning activity done through the night from 11pm to 7am restores it back. It is important that when one walks into the mall, the floors shine.

The design should keep every end in mind. For example, how are we going to keep clean if there are no plug points in the common areas or drainage holes in the bathrooms? Even so, the bathrooms design should such that they are negatively charged from an air- conditioning point of view. In the sense, the air-conditioning flows from the mall into the toilet not the other way round. One does not want the horrible urine smell from the bathroom to come into the mall.

From the toilet point of view, one has to make sure that there are enough hooks and stands, toilet paper rolls stands, hand wash station, hand wash towel stand, enough basins, enough taps, enough cubicles in the ladies bathroom, handicapped toilets, family toilets, and so on. All these things are required in order to run a modern toilet in a modern facility.

When you design a mall it’s a golden opportunity to implement sustainable management systems. Mantri Square was designed five years ago and built three years ago. It took three years to open this mall, the systems were not as sustainability oriented as they could have been. We have made fundamental changes here, we have dropped the cost of electricity and our consumption, and we have enhanced our recycling. But the point is we could be doing better had we designed it better at the beginning. We have to design the mall with sustainable featured factored in, but in India we have infrastructure problems. We have implemented certain sustainability features, but Mantri Square is not green rated building; it was never designed to be a green rated building. From a green rating point of view there are all sorts of issues like the structure of the building and the air-conditioning.

However we do have sustainability elements: We recycle waste; we proud to say the only mall in Bangalore that have an organic waste converter is Mantri square. We recycle and re uses our water. We have three tons of garbage a day, one of that is through the organic waste converter, two tons is hard garbage which is sorted offsite. Every single day, one truck takes the garbage offsite. We have a very low exposure to garbage because it’s beautifully sorted in accordance with the norms. Our garbage and water is taken care of and we even use wind energy to supplement the electrical consumption this mall.

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