Industrial Floors Matter

• 6 December 2016
• Local News
• 3401 Views

Industrial flooring now plays an essential role in any production area, F&B storage room, IT database server room, and becomes even more specialised in other areas such as commercial car parks, technical service rooms and warehouses.

People working in industrial areas understand immediately the huge value of flooring with product specific functions and high international standard performance in terms of long life, service provision, maintenance cost saving, and health & safety conditions.

Industrial floor surfaces cover a wide range of uses:

– Floor hardener (powder or liquid): warehouses, educational institutes, parking lots, mechanical workshops, light industrial factories and other commercial buildings.

– Epoxy floor: Clean rooms for pharmaceutical uses, automotive servicing and assembly areas, electrical and spare-part storage rooms.

– Ucrete floor known as PU floor: Food & beverage production, electronic component manufacture and assembly, server rooms, cooling rooms and chemical industry.

– The unique concept design of this floor technology is seamless, attractive and easy to properly clean compared with other tile floors. Besides being durable and with other properties like chemical resistance, this Ucrete complies with the international HACCP certification.

Local understanding & practices

Unfortunately, in our local practices, these functional floors seem to be a mystery and something to be unintentionally or intentionally ignored. There are several reasons behind this fact, including:

– Limited product knowledge of the designers and property owner which leads to mistakenly selecting the incorrect product during the design stage.

– Incorrect perception of functional floors being over-priced regardless of the huge benefits, facilities and low maintenance costs.

– Unable to find the real professional applicator to guarantee the job quality and standard.

– Local regulation, certificates and other standards are not well enough complied with and audited.

– Working in a traditional way which is change resistant.

Some effects of messy decisions

Wrong product selection at the beginning can cause enormous and unexpected expenses during the operation to fix non-stop problems. Poor product selection may result in:

– Difficult to assure food safety; e.g. Using tiles on production floors with many joints where bacteria can comfortably grow can delay the QC work.

– Unexpected risk during operation; e.g. Slippery floors in wet areas can provoke damage.

– Repairing a damaged floor in a big production area stops that production line. This is an obvious factor in delaying production and product delivery. Sometimes, one time fix cannot solve the problem and more time and cost is required.

• Knowledge and Key Success