Episode 26 – Producing Hygienically Clean Textiles

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

Welcome back to another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast by TRSA sponsored by 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. I’m your host, Jason Risley, the senior editor of digital and new media at TRSA. In this week’s episode, we discuss hygienically clean consulting with Audrey Carmichael, a client coach with 6 disciplines. Audrey is a certified Lean 6 Sigma black belt and a certified American Society For Quality or ASQ Quality Auditor. She brings more than 25 years of experience in light manufacturing, product development, technical communications, quality assurance management, and continuous improvement.

 

Prior to joining 6 disciplines, Audrey was the global director of quality assurance for Canberra, an international business unit of Areeva, a leader in the energy industry. In addition to strategic advisory services, Audrey has worked with 6 Disciplines clients using her lean expertise to review and improve processes, train teams of client employees and lean and problem solving, run turnkey improvement projects, and perform data analytics. Audrey shared her thoughts on the benefits of getting Hygenically Clean Certification for your commercial laundry, preparing for the certification with Hygenically Clean Consulting Services, and more. I’m here today with Audrey Carmichael from 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. Audrey, can you give us a little bit of background about yourself?

 

Sure, Jason. Thanks. So I work with 6 Disciplines Consulting Services, and I’ve been involved in the laundry industry for about 2 years. Prior to joining 6 Disciplines, I was the director of quality assurance and a continuous improvement manager for a large energy company. So I bring to HC Consulting my experience and and my background from doing auditing and and a quality control perspective.

 

Other work that I do with 6 disciplines includes our strategic planning and execution process and lean and 6 Sigma training. And let’s dive into your hygienically clean consulting services. Where can TRSA members go to learn more about this and sign up? As you know, more and more textile customers want hygienically clean certification from their laundries. The process for getting certified is very straightforward.

 

You go to the TRSA website and download an application. After you submit TRSA to schedule 1. But how do you know if you’re ready for an inspection? 1st, you have to have a deep understanding of the requirements. TRSA has 4 hygienically clean certifications, food safety, food service, health care, and hospitality.

 

Each of these has its own standard, which lays out the requirements for obtaining certification. Those are on the TRSA website too. You download those and make sure your program complies to the appropriate standard. At the inspection, the inspector will visit your site, conduct a thorough walk through, a review of your QA manual, and your records. Then they collect a sample of your product for bacteriological testing.

 

If your QA manual and walk through show you’re in compliance with the standard and your bacteriological test is good, you qualify for certification. How does Hygenically Clean Consulting fit into the process? What we do at 6 disciplines is give laundry operators a third party objective assessment of their facility and their readiness to apply for certification. It’s a low risk way to see if you’re ready to schedule an inspection and understand if you have more work to do. We’ve designed our 6 disciplines HC Consulting and Coaching service, to work with the facilities from the early stages of their planning through to their application and inspection.

 

Our commitment is to meet your organization where you are and help navigate you through the process. We visit the facility and conduct a line by line review of the operation against the agency standard they’re working toward. It’s a multistep process. First, we’ll take the standard and verify that the operation has a policy and a procedure to address each of the requirements exactly. These all need to be up to date and all compiled directly in a quality assurance manual.

 

That’s the first step. Then we’ll look for evidence that the procedures are being followed. This can be through reviewing records that have been kept or by verifying compliance physically, sometimes both. I’ll give you an example. This standard will require a pest control plan.

 

I’ll look in the QA manual to be sure there’s a policy around pest control, and I’ll look for a procedure for how they go about it. For example, how did they choose their pest control contractor? How often do they treat for pests? How do they handle this situation if a rodent is seen in the plant and so on? Then I’ll look for evidence they’re complying with their own procedure.

 

I’ll check for a contract with the pest control company and invoices to prove they’ve done the work as often as the procedure calls for. Out in the plant, I’ll look for traps or strips that show they’re following their own procedure and their pest control company’s program. During the review, I’ll make notes of any gaps in the program. Are they missing a procedure? Do they have records that are required, and are they located where they can be easily shown to an inspector?

 

This way, by the time they schedule their inspection, they have everything complete and in order, ready to go. But if they have gaps in their program and need some help, 6 disciplines can work with them to prepare for their certification too. We offer multiple levels of service to help guide and coach. And what are the level of services that you provide? This is where I think we clearly differentiate ourselves.

 

We’re there every step of the way if you want us to be. 6 disciplines has worked with TRSA to lay out three levels of service for hygienically clean consulting and coaching. The first level is a pre audit consultation and report. We conduct this as a mock interview at your site. We review your QA manual, perform a walk through of the facility, and review your records.

 

We provide a report with actions we recommend you take prior to scheduling your inspection. This is to give you some peace of mind that you’re ready or that you need to look more closely at some areas. The second level is a higher level of service. We review your existing SOPs and help develop additional ones so that your QA manual complies with the standard. This level also includes a mock audit and report.

 

The third level could be described as a turnkey service. We work with your team and create your QA program and manual, including forms, records, checklists, pretty much everything you need to have in place. This service also includes a final mock audit and walk through of your facility. We’re there to help because the reality is your team’s probably focused on running the business. Bringing us in short term can help you achieve the goal of getting certified sooner rather than later.

 

Also, if you need more help, we can work with you on activities like training your staff, project managing your tasks, and so on. We’re committed to helping you however you need. Can’t TRSA member organizations do this on their own? Sure. Some organizations can and have gotten certified on their own, but others would like to have some guidance along the way in help putting the program together.

 

6 disciplines offers our service as a low risk way to check on the readiness for inspection or even as a turnkey solution. It all depends on where they’re starting from, but it does take time and resources, and it can be a big endeavor on their own. I say everyone comes to this differently, so we’ll meet you where you are, and we’ll help navigate it together. The truth is all organizations have competing priorities and are managing different things. So while certification may be very important to your strategic plan, your available resources may not allow you to complete it in the time frame you want.

 

Our consulting for HC can provide focus and momentum and even some of the heavy lifting. What areas are the biggest challenges for facilities seeking hygienically clean certification? With 6 disciplines, I’ve had the chance to work with several laundry organizations and spend time in their plants. Prior to working in the laundry industry, I worked in QA and project management for a large company in the energy sector. So I know that the challenges of getting and maintaining certifications are real.

 

One challenge I’ve seen for the laundry industry is that many facilities haven’t had to document their procedures and keep records on such a wide range of topics before. The idea of having a comprehensive QA manual is new to them. Finding the time and internal resources to pull it all together can be an obstacle, but our service directly overcomes this obstacle. In some cases, changes to the actual plant and service operations will need to be made. This requires planning, implementation, and training everyone involved.

 

The plant and service managers have to work together and make sure those changes stick. Another challenge, specifically in the food service and food safety programs, is developing a HACCP plan. HACCP stands for hazard analysis and critical control points. It mirrors the type of risk based analysis that the FDA requires for food producers and services. Developing a HACCP plan is one area that tends to be somewhat confusing for the laundry operators.

 

But, really, there are great upsides too. Just the process of preparing for HC certification will help make the organization better. Ideally, the management team can use preparing for certification as a way to do a thorough look at how they run the plant and make sure they’re up to date with the best management practices, Not to mention the obvious benefit of becoming HC certified, which more and more textile customers are requiring. So, yes, there are challenges to getting ready for certification, and this is exactly why TRSA partnered with 6 disciplines to provide a third party service to help and guide its member organizations along the way. What is a good approach to certifying multiple facilities?

 

First of all, each facility needs to have their own QA manual. You can’t get around that because each facility is different. But certifying multiple facilities gives you a great opportunity as a company. What I mean is that you can use the hygienically clean best management practices to help standardize your operation across different locations. Where there are differences between buildings and operations, you’ll have to account for those, of course.

 

These are things like airflow direction from clean to soil, which depends on the building layout. But at the level of a policy and many procedures, you get the benefit of being consistent across all your operations. This is the approach I would take as your consultant and coach based on my QA experience and background. I’d work with a corporate management and, starting from the agency standard, create company wide policies. These don’t have to be complicated, just a statement of your expectations for all sites.

 

That ensures your consistency. Then I’d work with each of your sites. Starting from the policies, we’d write straightforward procedures that state how they’ll implement the policies. In many cases, the sites will have common procedures, but there can be exceptions. If it meets your business and customer needs, I wouldn’t hesitate to certify multiple sites.

 

How do you recommend preparing for multiple certifications at the same location? There’s quite a bit of overlap between all of the standards, so it’s certainly doable. I’d recommend contacting TRSA for information about multi certification discounts that might apply to you. As your HC consultant, I would approach it this way. I would consolidate all the standards into one QA manual as much as possible.

 

I’d make sure each section in the manual cross references the certification standards that apply. That way, you can be sure your procedures are complying to all the best management practices for the certifications you need, and you won’t be duplicating your efforts. As you move through this process, it’s good to think ahead even if you wanna get one certification now and another in the future. Good planning will pay off for your next certification. An important focus will be to make it as easy as possible for the HC inspector.

 

The more clear and organized the QA manual is, the better you can demonstrate to the inspector that you comply with all the requirements of all the standards. There is one exception in that the health care certification requires its own manual. But the process of preparing for a health care certification and another certification should take the same shared approach. 6 disciplines consulting and coaching will take all of this into account when helping you plan your certification journey. Just to wrap things up, how can our listeners reach you for more information?

 

The best way to reach me is actually through TRSA. If you would reach out to Angela Freeman at TRSA, she refers people requesting help and certification through to me. Great. Thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks so much, Jason.

 

Getting hygienically clean certification can set your laundry apart from the competition. If you are interested in getting hygienically clean certified and could use the hygienically clean consulting services that Audrey described in today’s episode, please contact TRSA’s manager of certification programs, Angela Freeman, at afreemanat trsa.org. That’s afreeman@trsa.org. Thanks again to our sponsor, 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. And as always, make sure you subscribe, rate, and review our show on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.

 

Additionally, follow TRSA on Facebook at trsaorg, on Twitter at trsa, on Linkedin at Textile Rental Services Association of America, and on Instagram attrsaorg.