Ideas for quality and safety improvement projects
Any body got idea on types of project that can be undertaken in the food industry (biscuit factory to be specific) to help improve performance in food safety and quality?
These have to meet the SMART goal criteria (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound)
Hello James,
Your topic is important but to make it easier , first you have to make a list with the problems that face you in the Factory or industry and maybe you could also to be considered the customer complaints after that you could make a project by using the lean six sigma methodology to get an improvement into your process.
Remember Improving built on ideas so make brainstorming and write all ideas and then evaluate each one and mark it by your ability of doing it or not based on your facility and team capability.
Dear James,
Here are some ideas for improvement for you factory, I hope it can help you further:
Food safety:
- Improve your foreign body management program
- Substantiate your food safety program with more literature and analysis data
- Study whether you can reduce the detection limit of your metal detectors
- Improve the food safety culture in your company
Quality:
- Reduction of product waste
- Optimization of the product weight
- Make the opening of the packaging easier for the consumer (of course, by maintaining it tamper proof!)
- Reduction of breakage of the biscuits
Kind regards,
Gerard Heerkens
A really good SMART project to undertake would be water usage tied directly to food safety. The amount of water used against the $$ saved WITHOUT sacrificing food safety. If your water bill is anything like ours, there is a real and true driving force behind reductions. PERHAPS (not knowing your process of course) you could swab against either longer production days or against more production days between cleaning/sanitation (not withstanding daily operational sanitation that MUST be done)
You will need targeted swabbing plans as well as expected data extrapolation prior to beginning....you may already have enough data to say I can't reduce frequency UNLESS I change chemicals (i.e to something more aggressive)
There are significant labour savings to be had if you are successful in reducing costs associated with cleaning/sanitaiton
I only suggest this as I was at a cheese house that switched from daily FULL clean/sanitation to 1/week full clean with zero ill effects.
Just make sure that you get a nice juicy bonus for the savings you've found!!
BTW are you green belt or such certified??