How to make a HACCP meeting useful?
Hello all,
As we all know HACCP meetings are mandatory, but in my last company and where I currently work these meeting are not particularly useful... I don't want to things "just for the auditor" but add value to the meeting.
At my current job we are just with a small team, 7 production employees, the director and me (and some sales people). Because it's a small team we talk daily to one and another and at the end of the month we fill in the meeting form because the auditor wants this.
Is there someone here with some tips for me to make the HACCP meeting useful? or at least a better way to do this?
I'm finding the meetings we're having at the moment very useful. We've rewritten our HACCP from scratch after poor audit feedback and we're incorporating HARPC at the same time. The focus on being very specific on the prerequisites down to which procedure we have as meant we've found probably about 5-6 occasions so far where we think we've asked people to do things but the procedure they've been trained against doesn't actually say it.
This might be less meaningful for a small site though.
Are you having specific HACCP meetings or are they Quality Meetings with HACCP included?
Why not make the HACCP review part of your Quality meeting agenda and do a Full scale HACCP review twice yearly (or quarterly if you change things more often.)
That's what I'm doing in my sites. I have risk assessed it because we were having HACCP review monthly and it was pointless. At the bi annual review I hand out the flow diagrams and the HACCP plans and ask the HACCP team to review them and come back in a week with recommendations. They have to walk the lines and make sure everything is included.We look at SOPs and records etc to make sure everyone is doing what they should. HACCP review can also be initiated by issues raised at the Quality meetings or even at the daily production meetings.
Thanks for the information both.
What we currently do is a HACCP and Quality meeting together once a month and talk about the following subjects:
- Internal non-conformaties
- NC regarding suppliers, maintenance, hygiene, pests, quality etc
- Customer complaints
- Legislation changes
- Changes to the production location
Once a year we do a review of the complete HACCP plan
But all the topics of the monthly meeting is already discussed during the daily bussiness so that is why this seems just something we do because the auditor wants it
I too am at a very small facility and having meaningful meetings is difficult because like you said, everyone interacts on a daily basis. What I'm currently doing is using this time to touch on anything quality related - not just HACCP. We'll review the HACCP plan - ensure that the CCPs are functioning properly, ensure their preventative maintenance is up to date, there are spare parts, etc. I'll review any current recalls in the news, go through our corrective action log with the team, go over internal audit results and ensure that all of the follow up has been completed, performing the required annual SOP reviews, etc.
We were having the same issue and moved our meetings to a quarterly basis. We have not had any issues or complaints in doing so over 4 years ago during our audits. I am able to provide documentation that individuals are notified immediately of information, situations and non-compliances that apply to them and then we just review and discuss everything quarterly as a team. If we need to have more meetings we just schedule them as needed.
Your list of topics is great. You might consider adding crisis management scenario to the list as that gets people thinking and covers audit requirements too. Just discuss a possible situation such electricity going out for several hours, flooding, bomb threat, uninvited guest, etc and how you would go about handling the situation..
We have production/facility meetings daily, so the urgent matters get communicated there. We use the Food Safety & Quality Committee meetings to do the annual review of the HACCP plan, raise any issues where documents/procedures are not working well and should be changed, or to look at a large topic that could improve the program.
We are finding it useful because our HACCP plan was written some time ago by previous mangers, so putting fresh eyes to it is helping us make it much more effective.
Martha