Standards library: IICRC, LEAN, OSHA, EPA, and state rules

What the standards library is

Every restoration category carries a stack of rules that were never written down anywhere your team can search: IICRC S500/S520 water and mold procedure, LEAN process discipline, OSHA respiratory and fall-protection requirements, EPA rules like the lead RRP rule and the NESHAP asbestos program, and state-specific licensing and notification rules for categories like mold. The standards library is Verinode's research corpus of that material, organized as reference SOPs you can search, read, and turn into your own documented process in one click.

This is Verinode's own research, not a peer contribution. Nothing here is anonymized data from another operator, so nothing in the standards library is blurred or gated behind a benchmark unlock the way peer margin or peer-SOP figures are. What you see is exactly what Verinode's research team has compiled for that framework and category.

Where to find it

Open Excellence from the sidebar. It takes you to /processes, where a horizontal row of tabs runs across the top of the card: Findings, Flow, All Processes, By Standard, Coverage, Benchmarks. Click By Standard. That tab is the standards library described in this article.

The All Processes tab also has a Standards filter pill that lists the same records as a flat list alongside your own SOPs and your pending confirmations. Use All Processes when you want everything in one place; use By Standard when you want to search or filter by framework and jurisdiction, since that is what the tab is built for.

Inside the By Standard tab

At the top of the tab sits a search box: Search standards by name, framework, category, or jurisdiction…. Typing there filters across every standard's title, framework, category, jurisdiction, and description at once, regardless of which framework pill is active.

Below the search box sits a row of framework pills, each with a live count of how many standards match it:

• All: every standard in scope for your account.
• IICRC: Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification procedure references (S500 water, S520 mold, and related).
• LEAN: process-discipline references built around Lean manufacturing principles applied to restoration work.
• OSHA: federal workplace-safety references (respiratory protection, PPE, fall protection, lockout/tagout, hazard communication).
• EPA: federal environmental references (the lead RRP rule for pre-1978 housing, the NESHAP asbestos program, and non-regulatory mold remediation guidance).
• State: state-specific licensing, notification, and disclosure rules, currently seeded for a first pass of states with mold-remediation licensing regimes (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Click a pill to filter the list to that framework; click All to clear the filter. Clicking State also reveals a line confirming scope: Showing [your state] regs only. The standards records that reach your browser are already scoped server-side to your own state (plus every global IICRC/LEAN reference and every federal OSHA/EPA reference), so the State pill only ever shows regs relevant to where you operate, never every state's rules at once.

Each row in the list shows:

• The standard's name (its source citation, like "29 CFR 1910.132 / 1910.134", or a fallback of the framework name plus "reference" when no citation is on file).
• A meta line: the record kind ("Standards"), the service-line category the standard applies to (Water Mitigation, Mold Remediation, Fire & Smoke, Reconstruction, and General are among the categories in scope), and the first line of the standard's description.
• An inline Adopt button on the right edge of the row. This is the fast path: no need to open the standard's detail view first, one click starts the adoption described below.

Empty states

• If your search and framework filter combine to match nothing: No standards match "[your search]" in [framework label].
• If a framework has no standards in scope yet with no search active: No [framework label] references in scope yet.
• If you're on the State pill and haven't set your state, the tab adds: Add your state in Settings → Profile to see jurisdiction-specific regs. Until you do, no state-specific entries can be scoped to you.

Opening a standard's full detail

Click anywhere on a row (outside the Adopt button) to drill into that standard's detail view. The header shows four figures at a glance:

• Framework: the standard's framework, in full caps (IICRC, LEAN, OSHA, EPA, or the state's framework token).
• Target Score: the LEAN-style score out of 100 an SOP built to this standard is expected to reach. Federal and state entries in the library today range roughly from 80 to 92 depending on how tightly the citation is written; global IICRC and LEAN references carry their own target scores.
• Required Steps: how many of the standard's steps are flagged as legally mandatory rather than best practice, with the regulatory citation and rationale attached to each one.
• Programs: how many carrier programs your account has on file that require an SOP in this category to reach at least this standard's target score. Shows a "require this" note when the count is above zero.

Below the header, the detail view has several sections:

Adopt as your SOP. A short summary of what adopting will scaffold ("You start with N pre-populated steps and the citations from [FRAMEWORK] already attached, no blank page") and the same Adopt as draft SOP button available from the list row. If you already have a documented SOP in this category, a note names it and clarifies that adopting creates a separate draft you can compare against rather than overwriting what you have.

Standard Overview. The full reference: Framework, Jurisdiction (Global for IICRC/LEAN, Federal for OSHA/EPA, or the two-letter state code), Source citation, Version (when the standard tracks one), Description, and Target Score written out as "X / 100."

Your SOP. Either a summary of the SOP you already have documented in this category (its title, step count, and LEAN score, with a note that comparing the two catches drift between what the framework requires and what your SOP actually says), or, if you have none, a prompt that drafting one against this standard is the cleanest starting point for the category.

Carrier Programs Requiring This (only appears when at least one program is on file). Each row names the program, shows a confidence tier (High, Medium, or Low, reflecting how confident Verinode's research is in the mapping between that carrier program and this standard), and the minimum target score the program expects.

Required Steps (only appears when the standard has any). Each entry shows the step's position in the standard's step sequence, the regulatory citation for that step, the step's description pulled from the standard's own step list, and the rationale for why that particular step is mandatory rather than optional. For example, the OSHA mold-remediation reference flags the written respiratory-protection program as required because it is mandatory under 29 CFR 1910.134(c) whenever respirators are called for, and flags medical evaluation and fit-testing as required because both must happen before a respirator is issued.

Adopting a standard as a draft SOP

1. 1Click Adopt on a row in the By Standard list, or Adopt as draft SOP inside a standard's detail view. Either button (and the same button on the matching row in the All Processes tab's Standards filter) does the same thing.
2. 2Verinode creates a new SOP under your account with status Draft, pre-populated with the standard's own step list. Every step the standard flags as legally required carries that citation forward as a locked reference on the corresponding step.
3. 3A confirmation appears: Draft SOP created. Open the All tab to refine the steps and activate. If adoption fails for any reason, an error toast tells you to try again.
4. 4Open All Processes, filter to My SOPs, and find the new draft. Its detail view shows an Adopted from panel naming the source standard and, if the standard had required steps, how many are locked by citation.
5. 5Edit the steps to match how your team actually runs the work. Click Edit steps to switch into a per-step editor (description, role, equipment, estimated minutes). Steps carrying a required-step citation show a Required pill; if you try to remove one, a confirmation dialog names the citation and the rationale before letting you continue, since removing it means the SOP no longer aligns with the source standard.
6. 6When the draft is ready, click Activate this SOP. Activating flips its status from Draft to Active, and the confirmation reads: SOP activated. It now contributes to peer benchmarks and links to jobs. Only active SOPs surface in job process matches and feed the peer-SOP comparisons on the Benchmarks tab.

How this differs from the Benchmarks tab

The By Standard tab compares your process against a published framework: IICRC, LEAN, OSHA, EPA, or a state rule. The Benchmarks tab on the same card does something different: it compares the shape of your own documented SOPs (step counts, step types, LEAN scores) against other operators running the same category and work type, once enough operators have contributed comparable data. See how benchmarks work and reading a benchmark for how those peer comparisons are built and displayed. The By Standard tab never needs a peer cohort to unlock, since it is reference research, not peer data.

Findings tied to a standard (a below-standard stance, a required-step gap) route through the same Findings workspace as everything else on the platform. See the decision workspace and acting on decisions for how to work those. Observed patterns waiting in Pending Confirmations often originate from documents or emails your team forwarded in, covered in forwarding documents; the standards library itself needs no document forwarding since it's pre-built research rather than something extracted from your own inbox. General questions about how any of your data reaches Verinode in the first place are covered in connecting your data.

Known limitations

State coverage is a first pass, not a complete map. The library currently seeds one mold-remediation reference per state for ten states with active licensing regimes. Categories and states outside that first pass simply have no state-specific entry yet: your federal OSHA and EPA references and the global IICRC and LEAN references still apply everywhere, but a state-specific citation for your state and category may not exist in the library until a later research pass adds it.

Sources