there were 450 ways we cleaned a rest-room,” Morrison said. “We had no manage-ment, no base system in place, no ability to direct and manage inventory, nothing. All things have to start with a standard, and we didn’t have a standard.” A Shift From The Ordinary Looking for a solution to this downward spi-ral, Morrison approached the principal of the elementary school where he was head custodian and asked her for something a bit out of the ordinary. “I said to her, ‘I want to go on nights for 60 days. I really want to take a look at what I’ve learned from every system out there, and I want to apply the study of time and motion to the cleaning process; I want to come up with a good way to clean my school,’” he said. Working the night shift with two other custodians, Morrison started taking best practices and putting them in place. After much trial and error, he determined that the best way to clean was to have a system where certain steps would be stacked up like a row of dominoes so that the act of executing one step would logical-ly “fall” toward the next; this is the essence of process cleaning. “Our average time to clean a classroom is six minutes. Most custodians can accomplish that task in about four minutes. But, process cleaning is built around an average speed,” Morrison said. “It’s not about working fast, it’s about being thorough, with a real plan in front of you and not deviating from that plan. When we clean, we clean for health. We don’t worry about appearance; when you clean for health, appearance will follow.” The national average, according to Morrison, holds that a custodian can clean 22,000 square feet of student and staff spaces in an eight-hour shift. WCSD custodians average upwards of 30,000 square feet, he said, and are accomplishing much more than the aver-age custodian. Recognizing the labor savings potential these numbers represented, Morrison went to the school board and gave them his pitch: “I said, ‘You give me 10 schools and, in one year, I’ll save you $180,000 in staff reduction and give you cleaner, more germ-free student and staff spaces, guaranteed.’” The board agreed and before the allotted year was out, Morrison had reached his goal, with 10 schools successfully execut-ing process cleaning. “They told me, ‘Rex, we think you’ve done a great job, but what we’re hearing is that there’s no way this will work in a high school or in a middle school,’” he said. “They said, ‘They’ve got these ballgames going on, stuff going on at night, it’s just too busy. So, add a high school and a middle school to the program, then come back and let us know what’s going on.’” What Morrison found was that the larger the number of employees at a specific site, the easier it is to make process cleaning work. Back To Basics Process cleaning operates from two basic principles: A map of the area and a service assessment log (SAL). connect with www.CMMonline.com www.facebook.com/CMMonline Twitter.com/CMeNewsDaily www.cm-enews.com www.cminstitute.net CMM Online Bulletin Board www.CMMonline.com/board.asp SUBSCRIBE/RENEW www.CMMonline.com/Subscribe PRODUCT INFORMATION www.CMMonline.com/FreeInfo Circle Product Information no. 209 on page 32 www.cmmonline.com 37
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