Best Practice In Cleaning

In the world of finance, indices like the FTSE 100 in the UK or the Dow Jones in the US are the benchmarks all listed companies gauge their overall performance against. These indices serve as a useful measure of performance with which companies can then compare their results against the move of the main index (FTSE100), or their nearest and most relevant sector index like the FTSE 350 Banks. The main aim is to out-perform the index and, of course, to perform better than their competitors in the same sector (against the sector index). But companies are not expected to out-perform the indices just once, they are expected to produce results that consistently out-perform the indices.

While it is true that this example really only looks at the financial expectation of companies, this example from the world of finance illustrates, in a very simple way, how company results are expected to match, at least, or out perform a pre-established expectation (the indices).

Outside the world of finance what benchmarks can we use to gauge our results across a common set of competitive companies? How can we compare ourselves against our competitors?

In any industry there are certain expectations that must be met, the cleaning industry is no different. The obvious example in the cleaning industry is for an area, building or surface to be clean, but that expectation is the end result of a lengthy process involving many steps, not least employing quality systems. Going back to the finance example, for a company to out-perform the index (or sector index), a lengthy process involving many steps have to be implemented in order to reach that expectation on a consistent basis. The key term to understand is consistency, without consistency, results will be haphazard, unpredictable and uncontrolled.

This process designed to deliver consistently good (great?) results in response to, and with commercial pressure, external expectations is Best Practice. It isn’t just one step nor is it focusing solely on the end result, it is adopting business and working practices that have an established track record throughout all business operations. The external expectations are legislative (HACCP, Environmental Act, Health & Safety, etc) and customer expectations and feedback.

How do you know that these practices constitute best practice? How are quality systems like continuous improvement integrated? Immediately what come to mind are the two opposites: best practice and continuous improvement. If the practice is considered the best then therefore there can be no room for improvement. In reality the practices considered best practice come from experience and an awful lot of sales pressure from manufacturers, but those alone cannot really be trusted. What it takes is a measured adoption of external practices (obviously legal expectations must be adopted) while implementing continuous improvement on those practices – the two opposite approaches now work together to create a true reflection of best practice.

How does Best Practice apply to cleaning? Whether the company is a facility management company contracted to provide a host of services or a company with an in-house cleaning team, or, obviously, a cleaning company; in all these examples cleaning operations form an integral part of business operations. It therefore follows that Best Practice must be applied to cleaning, and to do so requires the adoption of continuous improvement and best practice as described in the previous paragraph.

Futureclean Assured Systems can assist your company to achieve best practice in cleaning and cleaning processes, to start the discussion contact us – info@futurecleansystems.com