It’s Clean Achieves ISO 9001 Accreditation

We are pleased to announce that on 16 December 2021 our commercial cleaning services business achieved ISO 9001 accreditation.

Having attained SafeContractor accreditation for 12 years in a row, and in 2021 also achieving SafePQQ accreditation which includes as one of its key pillars a focus on quality, we wanted to go further. Our senior management team identified a need to focus more directly on quality management to drive both consistency in the quality of the services we offer and to foster a culture of continuous improvement throughout our business. Being a globally recognised quality standard, we felt that ISO 9001 offered the best framework to achieve our goal.

Our journey towards accreditation began back in December 2020 when we undertook desk research to identify the right consultancy to help us deliver an effective Quality Management System (QMS). We shortlisted three consultancies and appointed Alpha Swanson in York due to their local representation and past success in helping service-based companies like ours achieve ISO 9001 accreditation.

The next stage was to form an internal working group to partner with Alpha Swanson, and Jade Harper our office manager was our project lead, as she had successfully developed and implemented a QMS in previous businesses she had worked in.

Alpha Swanson undertook a detailed examination of our processes, documentation, communications, and evidence of continuous improvement. We were pleased to discover that we were already undertaking around 70% of what was required for us to achieve accreditation which ultimately saved us a lot of time.

After a few months work by Alpha Swanson and our in-house team, we had a QMS to be proud of.

Our next step was the selection of a certification body. Alpha Swanson provided us with a list and Approachable Certification were selected due their high benchmark for success. They commenced their work with a detailed review of our QMS, and then along with Alpha Swanson they randomly selected 10 of our customer sites to audit against our QMS. These sites included commercial offices, schools, warehouses, GP practices, and dental surgeries.

With the review of our QMS and audits complete, we received our certificate of accreditation at the end of last year.

We will now be able to bid for public sector and larger private sector contracts where being ISO 9001 accredited is a basic requirement. Of course most of the national commercial cleaning service providers have ISO 9001 accreditation, but we have now joined the 10% of regional commercial companies to have achieved ISO 9001.

This project has been a significant investment for It’s Clean costing around £15,000 which includes a significant investment of our own time in developing and implementing our QMS.

Everyone in our team, from the managing director to our valued cleaning operatives has had to change and improve the way we work to enhance the quality and consistency of the services we provide. 

Since the implementation of our QMS we have also benefited from an increase in the overall productivity of our business.

David Whan, our managing director concludes “the road to ISO 9001 accreditation has not been without its challenges, but I can honestly say that it has been one of the most beneficial projects we have ever undertaken at It’s Clean, and our customers are already giving us some very positive feedback on the improvements to the services we provide.”