Quality management systems are a “must have” in tenders. Do you have a quality management system that is a big folder of printed plans and procedures gathering dust on a shelf in the office? Does your quality management system make it out to your sites, to the real world where you deliver services to your customers? Every commercial cleaning or janitorial services group I’ve worked with delivers a great service – really, they wouldn’t be in business long if they did not. However, quality is more than clean buildings. A quality management system for contract cleaning, janitorial services or building contracting in general, must include:
- Quality inspections,
- Audits,
- Identifying issues (or non-conformances),
- Track follow-up of issues (corrective actions),
- Create an audit trail of who did what, when,
- Identify what is overdue and what the priorities are
- Easily schedule inspections, audits – so nothing gets missed.
And finally, all this must be organised and supervisors and managers able to demonstrate all this to an client or an auditor in a simple, transparent manner. Can you do this with your folder on your shelf?
Quality Management Integrated Into Service Delivery
Making your quality management system a daily part of service delivery in contract cleaning and janitorial services is a challenge for modern companies. Typically, labour is lean, and the focus is on getting the work done. By making your quality management system part of your day to day operations, you can effectively manage the quality process as part of your service delivery. We work with companies every day who are integrating quality management into their contract service delivery – across commercial cleaning, janitorial services, landscaping, maintenance, and other “soft services” in building service contracting.
They are achieving this by managing their work better:
- Using web based work scheduling solution Kevah Works,
- Making staff and supervisors responsible for reporting what has been done,
- Accurately tracking Periodicals, Work Orders and Extra Work,
Combinging this with effective, scheduled quality assurance and inspections:
- Creating inspections tailored to the site in KevahWorks,
- Scheduling these inspections to ensure they are performed as required,
- Immediately raising non-conformances as jobs (either paid extra work, or just work orders),
- Tracking the priorities, timelines, and actions on these jobs – closing out the corrective action loop.
By integrating quality management inspections with work management, your staff will be more involved in the quality assurance process. They will follow-up and close out issues faster (because they are listed in the job schedule). All inspections will be completed because they will be scheduled as jobs to complete. Clients can also be given “read only” access, so service delivery and quality management inspections and reports are available in a transparent way. Our experience has been that this creates a higher level of trust and partnership between contractors and their clients, resulting in higher rates of contract renewal.
