TECHNOLOGY & DATA
Proving the clean
Carlton Relf, Managing Director at Maidscando, explains why cleaning providers must prove everything is clean.
With two-thirds of facilities management (FM) and cleaning service contracts outsourced, cleaning providers taking responsibility for customer estates’ cleanliness can’t simply rely on different premises or areas looking clean: they must prove everything is clean. Today’s technology innovations are not only boosting UK providers’ core cleaning capabilities, but also redefining their reporting processes and driving up service delivery standards.
Go-to frameworks
The British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc) provides the playbook for cleaning standards. Its framework sets out the options for different market sectors to achieve best practices and higher cleaning standards. Just as its guidelines support estate and cleaning managers when drawing up cleaning specifications, so contractors gain the insights to design quality, consistent and measurable services to meet them.
This framework thinking – together with advances such as the NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness – are driving up UK cleaning standards while promoting greater transparency in operations and reporting. Rising standards are undoubtedly helping create new business opportunities for ambitious cleaning firms. However, they’re also increasing the expectations on cleaning suppliers, especially those in supply chains, to formalise service delivery and reporting and, crucially, use data and auditing to drive service improvements and regulatory compliance.
In particular, innovative cleaning providers are using these principles to standardise their entire cleaning offer around radical transparency, data-driven reporting and a proactive ‘technicians not cleaners’ ethos. This uncompromising focus is raising cleaning regimes’ standards, with reporting and auditing processes creating the feedback loop to drive improvement and simpler compliance with industry standards.
Technicians not cleaners
First, forward-thinking cleaning companies put employees at the heart of cleaning services and empower them with a ‘technicians not cleaners’ ethos, to drive up cleaning standards and ensure greater job accountability. These technicians deliver the best cleaning standards while becoming the customer’s eyes and ears, identifying potential future challenges and recommending measures to address the situation.
In practice, technicians note where cleaning regime improvements can be made or where ageing building fabric could cause a future trip hazard. Technicians report all such
52 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING
instances to their line manager, who can provide the customer with updates and advise on remedial actions.
Radical transparency
Second, cleaning companies have integrated a battery of tests into their regular cleaning procedures – such as ATP hygiene swabs, microbial swabs and laboratory testing – to deliver a radical level of transparency for customers. These tests are taking cleaning beyond ‘naked eye’ tests to provide full verifiable evidence of the absence of bacteria and viruses.
Data-driven reporting
Third, while the industry is undoubtedly waking up to the potential of data to analyse cleaning regimes or better direct cleaning resources to where they’re needed, leading cleaning companies have already made the seismic shift, embedding data-driven reporting into their core processes.
Smart providers now issue customers with daily, digitised job service reports with auditable data; this gives customers the near real-time data and the promise of simplified audit, taking accountability way beyond unscientific, ‘tick- box’ compliance exercises. This approach not only gives customers tighter and time-efficient service oversight, but it also gives them detailed information to drive service improvements – or the freedom to raise standards elsewhere in the estate/FM agreement.
Higher standards
The BISCc and NHS Cleanliness Standards provide the vision for better UK cleaning regimes. Yet profound differences are also being made on the ground by innovative cleaning companies’ empowerment of cleaning technicians to raise standards, their use of cutting-edge testing to prove cleaning regimes’ efficacy and their digitisation of service reports, which are all helping meet cleaning specifications and drive up service standards.
As expectations of cleaning contractors rise, suppliers can increasingly show that the facilities they manage not only look clean but can be proven to clean – to any industry’s increasingly demanding specifications.
www.maidscando.co.uk x.com/TomoCleaning
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
