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As a facility service cleaning provider, I am usually excited to attend cleaning innovation forums that draw facility managers from a variety of industries. Our company provide services to a broad range of clients and the opportunity to discuss best practices implemented by participants at my table is of particular interest.

While every facility poses its own unique cleaning challenges, cleaning providers also face many common issues. We at Transcend Facility Management Company are on a continuous quest for technologies to improve cleaning efficiencies and safety in order to maintain a high quality of service, all while facing stringent budgetary pressures. We work to overcome these common challenges by benchmarking, leveraging, and implementing best practices as follows:

Standardization: We do not take short cuts. This key component is often overlooked by the industry. Things go out of whack and cleaning procedures are modified on an ad-hoc basis. At TFMC, we review our operations regularly and standardize them as much as possible to maintain consistent quality across the board.

Documentation: Our checklist is our guide. The lack of clear documentation to point out scope of work changes can lead to unequal distribution of workloads between janitorial technicians leading to reduced efficiencies. Fortunately, at TFMC, we install programs that can run this type of calculation, making it easy to distribute workload more effectively.

Formal Inspections: We cannot improve what we cannot or do not measure. At TFMC, metrics are essentials to ensuring quality as we track performance trends. Our formal inspection process spotlights which cleaners deserve positive feedback and which could benefit from additional coaching. We use a formal inspection process as a tool to demonstrate to clients that we are engaged in a proactive, rather than a reactive, service.

Training: The key to our training success is making sure our team leaders are well versed in the cleaning processes we implement. When team leaders are not up to speed with new, proven technologies and procedures, they pass on their outdated knowledge to team members. This leads to a multitude of inefficiencies and diminishes productivity.

Implement Industry Standards: We are active members of ISSA and BSCAI. They provide a wealth of information for optimizing our cleaning operations. Tapping into these resources helps us to qualify and quantify our operations. Their Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) is a great tool for measuring the areas where our operations may need improvement.