Labelling and Pack Controls 6.2.1
Hi BRC V7 has a new clause Requirement 6.2.1 of the BRC Standard for Food Safety requires sites to have a formal process for the allocation of packaging materials to packing lines which ensures that only the packaging for immediate use is available to the packaging machines. Ideally, this will be achieved by only releasing new packaging from the store when all packaging from the previous run has been removed from the area.
This is going to add significant costs to our business by drastically increasing our changeover times. We have a large number of SKU and can have over 3000 changeovers a year.
Can anyone tell me how they are managing it and/or if FSSC22000 or IFS have similar clauses, it may be time to change
Welcome to our world! Supermarket customers have this their COP's hence it making the cut into V7. Changing my new company's habits is an uphill task but progress is being made. Its mainly about management and control which they're finding difficult! I had some racks on wheels made up where all labels are kept away from the lines. Getting the line leader to allocate a person to take back old labels to the rack and pick up new labels isn't rocket science but as it's 'new' thing they're behaving like the end of world and cant possibly find the time.........
Needless to say they're finding time and its working :shades:
By the way, looking at your numbers of 3000 a year.....
1 Line in one of our packing rooms averages 30 changes in a 10 hour shift and on a Monday am catch up can have 20 changes in the first 3 hours easily!
circa 9000 changes a year on one line alone
thanks for the info we were thinking of lock out labels etc with cable ties, but the trolley sounds good, but still we will have to have both on the labeler at the same time as we use new labels to push old ones out. Stopping and removing old labels and then rethreading the new ones is where we will lose significant amounts of time
They'll get quicker. Its all about control and lessening the risk of mis-labelled product.
An old adage I remember was '2 minutes to check or hours to correct'.
The biggest complaint from retailers here (and should imagine there too?) is wrong labels/dates/label information
I once explained to a new production who was in the process of streamlining that rushing label checks and having everything around was high risk as any perceived time savings are lost with even the most simple of mistakes requiring reworking etc. Best case for him would be product caught in despatch and requiring hours worth of lost time and cost of packaging for the sake of saving 2 minutes change over time. After a few weeks he proudly said he saved over 2 hours in change over on 1 line alone........ week 3: 2 hours worth of product on 1 line had gone out wrong to the customer requiring a RTM. £50,000 fine and all the politics involved in the investigation and corrective action. Time save made circa £1000 only.....