Cleaning Stations
Cleaning Stations and Cleaning Shadow Boards are a vital starting point for any 5S initiative, providing a structured visual management solution to keep cleaning tools organised, accessible, and ready for use. By ensuring that the right cleaning equipment is available at the right time, these stations support efficiency, safety, and a professional working environment.
Whether you’re looking to implement 5S cleaning stations for the first time, upgrade existing setups, or introduce mobile cleaning stations for flexible workflows, Peak VM can provide tailored solutions to meet the needs of your workplace.
- Reduce time wasted searching for cleaning tools.
- Differentiate between production areas to avoid cross-contamination.
- Extend the lifespan of cleaning tools and consumables.
- Improve workplace safety & hygiene by keeping tools organised and in their correct location.
- Reinforce professionalism and consistency in your operations.
- Support Lean visual management practices and encourage accountability across teams.
How Cleaning Stations Can Improve Your Workplace
Mobile or Free-Standing Cleaning Stations
For workplaces with limited wall space or the need for centralised access, our mobile and free-standing cleaning stations ensure that cleaning tools are always visible, organised, and ready to use.
- Mobile Cleaning Stations come with heavy-duty castors for easy relocation and secure locking, making them ideal for shared workspaces or multi-zone production areas.
- Free-Standing Cleaning Stations can be fixed in place with base plates, providing a stable and permanent visual management solution.
These solutions guarantee that your cleaning equipment is in the right place at the right time, every time.
Wall-Mounted Cleaning Stations
Wall-mounted cleaning stations are perfect for high-traffic areas or locations prone to spills. They provide a consistent, visible location for cleaning tools, so employees always know where to find them.
Options include drilling fixings or magnetic mounting, particularly useful for steel-clad walls in food and beverage or industrial settings.
Cleaning shadow boards can also be integrated into wall-mounted stations, offering visual cues for each tool’s location and instantly highlighting missing items.
Cleaning Station Shadow Boards
Cleaning Station Shadow Boards are a core Lean visual management tool. By outlining each cleaning tool in its designated position, teams can quickly identify missing items and maintain organisational standards.
This helps reduce downtime, prevents errors, and encourages a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
Select Your Cleaning Station Configuration
Our cleaning stations are available in a variety of standard configurations, designed to suit your operational requirements.
You can choose fully equipped stations with a range of tools and colour options, partially equipped setups, or stations supplied without tools so you can incorporate your existing cleaning equipment. The stations are designed to accommodate durable cleaning tools made from plastic, wood, or metal, suitable for a wide range of industrial environments.
To help you plan the ideal layout, we also provide a downloadable Cleaning Station template maker, allowing you to design a solution that maximises efficiency and usability for your workplace.
Want to know more?
Discuss with our team how we can help design a cleaning station that helps your team stay efficient, safe, and audit-ready.
Cube or Bespoke Cleaning Stations
Our expertise also extends across industries where cleaning tools and consumables require innovative storage solutions, beyond conventional hand-use cleaning tools. For these environments, we offer the flexible Visual Management Cube method, which can be tailored to your exact needs. Cubes can be equipped with doors and internal shelves for storing cleaning consumables, spare items, or specialised equipment.
They can be mounted on heavy-duty castors for full mobility or fixed in place on base plates for a stable, permanent solution. This bespoke approach ensures your cleaning stations are not only practical but also fully adaptable to your workspace, optimising efficiency and accessibility for all users.
Design & Branding
All of our 5S cleaning stations are manufactured to order and can feature your company branding. Visual consistency reinforces operational standards and communicates professionalism across your team; our bespoke, branded cleaning stations not only improve workplace aesthetics but also highlight the importance of effective visual management in everyday operations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Peak Visual Management has over 10 years in advising, developing designs, manufacture and supply of Shadow Boards. We can supply Shadow Boards to visually store hand tooling, specialist tooling, machine parts and more.
We thought it might be useful to share some answers to the many questions we get asked about our Shadow Boards.
What is the process for designing a Shadow Board?
– Send the tools to PeakVM – If you have tools that you can be without or are buying in new tools – you can send them directly to us or we can arrange to collect.
This gives the us the benefit of being able to check the fit of each tool on the shadow board before we despatch. We are also happy to buy in tools if you would like us to supply the tools to go with your Board.
– Send us the photo information we need. This works well if you have a relatively small and simple selection of hand tools that you wish to store on your Shadow Board.
We will send you in the post a printed grid board and instructions for how to correctly photograph the tools for accurate Board design.
– Invite PeakVM to site. Invite a PeakVM representative to your facility and we will audit the tooling to ensure we have everything we need to accurately design your Board.
Depending on your location and the time required onsite we might have to charge a little extra for this option
What materials do you use for your Shadow Boards?
We use a combination of materials for our Shadow Boards, and we choose the best material option suited to the application.
Most of our Boards are based on applying a laminated vinyl print to an Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) base. ACM is long lasting and durable whilst easy to work with, providing reassurance if your maintenance teams are to fix the Shadow Board to existing wall space. If there is to be heavier items (such as lifting tackle or large torque wrenches) to be stored on the Board then 3mm aluminium sheet provides and hard wearing and heavy-duty base material. For environments where tooling might be ‘roughly’ handled, we recommend applying a protection to the face of your Shadow Board to eliminate any potential scratches to the face of the board. Polycarbonate provides a cost effective, durable and visually pleasing option.
We use a combination of fixings to store the tools onto the Board. Hardened Steel Dowels with an applied rubber grip ensure maximum grip for your tools. Along with Dowels Spring Clips are ideal for storing hand tools and less heavy equipment, making tool removal simple and low effort. We use a combination of bolts for heavier items to provide extremes of mechanical strength.
What if we want to store very heavy tools or parts on our Shadow Board?
We have supplied Shadow Boards for many applications where very heavy parts or tools are to be stored such as machine changeover parts, lifting tackle or Rail industry tooling. We will specify appropriate fixings which will have the mechanical strength to hold the weight of the part. We often also advise mounting the Shadow Board angled onto an A Frame so that the weight of the parts is pushing into the mechanically strongest part of the fixing at the intersection with the board. The use of an A Frame and the angled fixing it provides also reduces the chance of parts falling off the Board particularly for mobile Shadow Board applications.
I’m struggling for wall space; can you supply the Shadow Board on a freestanding frame?
Yes, we can supply our shadow boards on frames. We use a 40mm aluminium profile which is extremely strong and provides the flexibility to modify or adapt for future uses. We would generally advise that a Shadow Board supplied on a free-standing frame be supplied on base plates that are mounted to the floor (for stability and safety reasons), but it is also possible for our frames to be supplied on castors.
Can you supply mobile Shadow Boards?
Yes, we can supply our shadow board on mobile frames. As many factories and depots have uneven floors so we generally advise that mobile Shadow Boards are supplied on an angled A Frame to reduce the risk of tools falling off the board.
Can you the supply the Shadow Boards in a lockable cabinet?
Yes, and we have supplied many Shadow Boards into lockable cabinets. Some common reasons for using our lockable cabinets is if there are multiple shifts, contractors working onsite or to protect calibrated or sensitive equipment. Our cabinets are constructed from an Aluminium extrusion frame and clear polycarbonate panels. These clear panels allow for full visibility of the tools. We can supply the cabinets with keypad lock so there is an option to change the security password/pin at set intervals.
What is the lead time for a Shadow Board?
The lead time of a shadow board hinges on a few factors:
- Tooling availability – the sooner we can get our hands on the tools/tooling information the sooner we can start designing.
- Complexity – complexity is added to a shadow board by either a larger number of tools or unusual/larger/detailed tools. If a Shadow Board is more complex it will take more time to both design and assemble.
- Quantity and specification – quite simply a larger project with more detailed work will take more time to design and manufacture.
Typically, a “straight forward” Shadow Board project with good tool availability, of low complexity of medium level quantity and specification will take 2-3 weeks from order.
How big can you make a Shadow Board?
The largest ACM sheet size available is 2400 x 1200mm. However, if there is specialist tooling involved or a very high number of tools that will require the layout to exceed this size we can spilt the design over multiple sheets of materials. We have done this on many occasions for specialist applications such as Rail track gauges and pipe storage.
How long will a PeakVM Shadow Board last?
This isn’t an easy one to answer, the longevity of our Shadow Boards is directly affected by several factors.
- Environment – harsh chemicals found in cleaning equipment and lubricants can, over time have a negative affect on the materials we use to manufacture our Shadow Boards.
- Behaviours– if the board is respected and tools are carefully returned then there is less risk of dents and scratches appearing. The fixings used to hold tools in place are also more likely to retain their mechanical integrity when not treated poorly.
- Usage – The number of times tools are being placed onto and removed from the Shadow Board will have an effect on how “fresh” that the board stays.
Difficult environments and heavy usage will have an effect on how well your Shadow Board lasts. However, we have seen well used PeakVM Shadow Boards in testing environments such as rail depots still in use 5-8 years after initial supply.
Will you supply the Shadow Board with our specific branding?
Yes, all our Shadow Boards are designed specific to each client so we are keen to ensure the logos and branding design elements are added to the Shadow Board design.
Proven Impact of Our Cleaning Stations
Explore our case studies to see how Peak VM has helped organisations across the UK implement effective, durable, and visually clear cleaning stations and cleaning shadow boards, improving efficiency, safety, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
