Logistics & Warehousing

Most logistics operators buy warehouse cleaning from one supplier and pest control from another, and it works until an auditor asks how the two interact. Then the cleaning contractor points at the pest contractor about rodent evidence behind the racking, the pest contractor points at the cleaner about the spilled product feeding it, and the facilities manager is holding two sets of paperwork that do not reference each other.

MUMTAZ holds both scopes. The Cleaning Crew division does racking, floors and structure; the municipality-approved Pest Control division runs the HACCP-aligned rodent and insect programme in Sharjah, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One account manager, one method statement, one risk assessment, and reports that share a site plan and a numbering system, so activity at a monitoring point can be read against the cleaning record for that bay. Gulftainer is a MUMTAZ client.

High-level cleaning of racking, bracing, cable trays, sprinkler pipework and roof steel, because dust on horizontal structure is a contamination route in food and pharma facilities and a fire-load question everywhere else. Work is taken in sections so aisles are released back to operations as they finish.

Floors are scrubbed mechanically with the pad or brush grade matched to the surface, power-floated concrete, epoxy coating, sealed screed and cold-store tiling all behave differently, and the wrong abrasive costs more to reinstate than the clean did. Oil and hydraulic spill areas need degreasing chemistry and dwell time rather than more pressure.

Cold and chilled storage is scoped separately: low-temperature chemistry, controlled water use so nothing freezes, and concentration on the door line, evaporators and floor-to-wall junctions where problems actually occur.

On the pest side, a numbered device site plan, scheduled inspections, trend reporting across visits and reactive call-outs between them. Products are municipality-approved and applied under our approvals.

We work across JAFZA, Dubai Investments Park, Al Quoz, the Sharjah Industrial Areas, Hamriyah and Mussafah. Each has its own gate pass, induction and permit expectations, and work at height or with powered access normally needs a permit issued by your own HSE team. We provide method statements, risk assessments, technician documentation and insurance, and confirm what is needed from your side before mobilising, because the commonest wasted mobilisation in this sector is a crew arriving at a gate it cannot pass.

No operator can hand over an empty building for a week, so scheduling is the hard part rather than an afterthought. We work nights, weekends and shutdown windows, rotate through aisles during live shifts, and plan around inbound and outbound peaks. For sites with seasonal peaks the sensible pattern is heavy structural work in the trough with a lighter cycle running through the busy months.

The commonest failure in warehouse contracts is a schedule sold on paper that the operation cannot sustain. A monthly high-level clean sounds thorough until it collides with peak season and gets deferred three times, at which point the programme has no credibility with either the operator or an auditor.

We set cycles per area from the survey rather than as one site-wide figure. Goods-in, waste areas and food-handling zones usually need a short cycle; a slow-moving high-bay aisle does not. Roof structure and sprinkler pipework may need attention once or twice a year, while floor scrubbing runs continuously. Splitting the building this way keeps the total cost sensible and puts the effort where the risk is.

Cycles are then reviewed against evidence. If pest monitoring shows repeated activity in one bay, that is a signal the cleaning interval for that area is wrong, not just that more bait is needed. If a zone stays clean between visits, its interval can be extended. Because both scopes sit with one contractor working from one site plan, those adjustments are based on the site's own data rather than on a supplier's standard template.

Pricing follows the same logic. Height, floor area, floor type, stock profile, cold-store presence and the available operating window all move the number materially, which is why we survey before quoting rather than offering a rate per square metre that would have to be renegotiated once we saw the building.