From recruiting highly skilled workers to surviving upcoming predicted UK manufacturing industry recessions, running a factory comes with plenty of challenges. Maintaining production line cleanliness is one of the most important of these challenges.

When done right, production line cleanliness allows your staff to do what they need to do with no impediments – resulting in greater employee satisfaction and increased productivity levels.

That being said, it requires thought and hard work to achieve. With that in mind, we’ve written this short article to discuss how you can keep your factory production line clean.

Comply with regulations

As an employer, you have a duty to provide a safe and healthy workplace to your employees. This duty is enforced by UK health and safety legislation, so it’s imperative you uphold it to the best of your ability.

Make sure that you’re familiar with all the major regulations in place, such as:

• The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974
• The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992
• The Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992
• The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998

Create a plan

In order for successful cleaning to occur, you need to make sure that everything is in place beforehand. This means working out a plan and making the necessary preparations ahead of time.

Here are three basic elements you should include while planning out your cleaning process:

• Create an equipment list – Note down all of the cleaning products and equipment that your team will need to use – ranging all the way from spray bottles and cleaning agents for wiping down surfaces, to PVC strip curtains for shutting out debris and dust. The exact items on this list will depend on the setup of your production line and the machines you use.
• Assign responsibilities – You need to distribute jobs throughout your team according to skill level and workload. Each member of your team needs to know which tasks they need to accomplish, as well as understand how to do this according to best practices.
• Keep records – Have your team record which jobs have been completed and by whom. This will make it easier to keep track of which jobs are left to do and help resolve any cleaning issues that occur.

Get employees invested

Ultimately, your employees are the people who will keep your production line clean. So, it’s important you communicate the benefits of high standards of cleanliness, such as improved safety and greater work efficiency. Whether you do this through team-wide emails or in person, make sure you explain how championing the cleaning process can help them.

Creating a culture of cleanliness doesn’t happen overnight. But if you start by implementing our advice above, you can begin streamlining the process of keeping your factory production line clean today.