Cleaning Products Getting Them Right

When we first started out as a cleaning company we worked hard to ensure we only employed the right type of people and then put them through our own specially designed training course to make them really effective.. We were right to do that but we missed out on another important issue and that was about providing the right tools and cleaning chemicals. We learned by experience that the wrong chemicals reduced the top cleaners down to the level of an average cleaner.

When we were developing our ideas for the two ISO standards (Quality and Environment) we formed a working party to examine what work would be handled by the various managers. During one of the working party sessions we had a visit from the newly appointed Glasgow cleaners office. It was part of his induction so we allowed him to sit and discover how brilliant we all were. However he flustered us by asking what tests we had conducted on the current cleaning chemicals. We had to admit we did not know. It often takes a new person to ask the most basic questions which the rest of us just know we used those chemicals from the year dot.

Anyway none of us were able to give a good hard explanation that really satisfied ourselves.

Re-thinking through the whole process we started to talk about what was important in commercial cleaning products. A simple bit of brainstorming brought out a nearly a page of quick notes.

It did not take long to realise that the cleaning products we were using did not meet all the criteria and the search began for alternatives. You can’t just walk down to the local supermarket and pick up up commercial cleaning chemicals like you do with tin of baked beans. You need to judge their performance in a number of situations and over some time.

In addition to practical testing we needed to read the literature including msds sheets, and to learn more about any safety issues both to people and the environment including the customers premises. It would not have been good practice to be able to clean a polished wooden floor but find that over time the floor was being destroyed by the acidic cleaning solution caused by using too strong a solution. We have a professional pride and reputation to keep, don’t we?

Although there were a lot of good products tested by us over the next six months only one met all the criteria we had drawn up prior to the test starting. The Soluclean range was the perfect answer for us both in terms of high cleaning power but also bottom of the table for ability to cause harm to people or the planet we live on Virtually impossible to accidentally use the wrong strength came in small concentrated sachets so no-one was driving across country with large amounts of water with some small element of chemicals added. In addition they could be used in hospitals to clean and kill off bacteria and germs that are difficult to remove without using toxic chemicals harmful to people.

We immediately decided that the best way to protect the standards and make sure we could ensure access to these chemicals was to become the national distributor for Scotland. We now sell these cleaning chemicals to other companies in our area.