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MUSC shines with APPA cleaning application
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Maintaining the appearance of buildings and providing quality
workspaces for MUSC employees, students and faculty is the mission of a
team of custodial professionals and housekeepers of MUSC Facilities
Management.
The Facilities Management team struggled through some transition and a
tough economic year including streamlining of their operations while
having to maintain efficiency and quality standards with their
customers.
Since July, this group has been pushing the envelope when it comes to
providing their services to internal customers throughout miles of
office space, free-standing houses and more than 60 buildings that help
compose MUSC’s 70-plus acre campus located in the City of Charleston.
“What we needed was to identify a mechanism that could accurately track
the campus’ level of cleanliness with custodial staffing levels to
develop a quality cleaning plan for the university,” said Paul
LoCicero, MUSC Quality Control manager. “We found it through the
Association of Physical Plant Administrators’ (APPA) Clean Ops program.”
This new audit assessment tool is designed to help organizations
determine their baseline cleanliness levels, compared to standard space
—office areas, labs, classrooms and buildings—and other related data to
determine the amount of space that required cleaning. Building space
was categorized into areas as defined by APPA guidelines—level 1,
orderly spotlessness; level 2, ordinary tidiness; level 3, casual
inattention; level 4, moderate dinginess; and level 5, unkept neglect.
MUSC joins the California Institute of Technology, Michigan State
University, the Louisiana State University Health Science Center and
the American Museum of Natural History as one of 160 private American
companies and institutions that utilize the Clean Ops Staff program.
Space is evaluated by custodial supervisors like Virginia James. James,
who regularly inspects about 62 buildings per month or 70,000 square
feet, uses a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device to randomly
inspect clean work spaces and areas. James’ PDA is loaded with an APPA
application that uses a number scoring system (1-5, with 5 being the
lowest) to evaluates a room’s floors, lighting, trash containers,
horizontal and vertical surfaces.
Data from these space utilization reports are used to provide
customizable audits for management and feedback to zone supervisors and
housekeeping staff within five areas of campus. So far, the results
have been positive with comparable data and improved efficiency among
custodial staff. MUSC’s Quality program, MUSC Excellence, has already
shared positive reports and comments from department representatives
and employees through the last quarterly internal customer surveys.
“The program provides a great checks-and-balance system for our
operation and allows us to make any adjustments and schedule work for
our teams to respond in specific areas,” said Fred Farris Jr., and MUSC
Facilities Management zone supervisor. “It allows us to address
problems even before they happen while still maintaining a clean
environment.”
According to LoCicero, because there’s greater work efficiency as a
result of using this program there’s time for housekeeping staff to
expand their cleaning effort in other areas and special projects. It
also provides James and other supervisors greater time to round on
their internal customers, share report findings and most importantly,
gain feedback.
“We’re glad that this new APPA custodial inspection program has helped
meet our needs and expectations for providing a good service while
keeping our internal customers happy,” said John C. Malmrose, chief
facilities officer, MUSC Engineering and Facilities.
“Our focus is on quality and accountability and sometimes it’s tough to
meet all of our customer’s expectations. This program allows us to do
things more effectively and reach beyond our expectations,” Malmrose
said.
Friday, Feb. 19, 2010
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