Hi all,
I was looking for some advice/ a place to vent a little.
I am having a bit of a fight (including a pretty heated argument this morning!) with our general manager as to what is expected of quality and production/ warehouse personnel.
This stems from an insect problem we are experiencing- cigarette beetles are a known pest in many of our raw materials and we saw activity last year in the hot summer months and again this year.
The fight comes from who is responsible for inspecting the warehouse for infested materials. I have been pushing my GM in our morning meetings to have someone from the production/ warehouse/ temp workforce to be dedicated to searching through our raw materials. I inevitably get push back as 'someone didn't turn up today' or 'a forklift is broken' or 'we need to get product out the door'. I am asked if I expect production to be stopped for this and get surprised looks when I say yes.
After nearly 2 weeks of little to no action, I finally got bored and went to senior management (a fairly small company so that is not a big leap) as I know that they do believe in food safety and would get the GM to do something. They were certainly pretty upset when they came to the warehouse 2 weeks ago and saw insects flying around, but they are also hands off, so since then have been expecting that quality and production would do their bit.
Of course this really upset the GM who came to see me and had essentially thinks quality should be doing this (and I should not go behind his back to management!). My response is that with only 2 QA techs, if I pull one of them from their normal quality inspection work then we create another food safety problem of inspection checks or other quality tasks not being performed. Instead, we have 20 or so production personnel, and as our cheapest labor it should be one of those workers assigned to this task- the task being to inspect pallets or partials for signs of activity, clean any spills, bag any partials that are not already double bagged (majority will be 50 pound kraft sacks) and bag and dispose of any infested material.
My question is whether I am really thinking of this in the correct way. (I should point out here I have education but little practical experience). My thought is that the warehouse inspections should be 100% owned by warehouse/ production personnel. Quality have liaised with pest control, sorted out treatments etc., talked about improvements we can make on the QC side to try and stop this, but now we have given direction to the GM on inspecting for activity, it is now up to them to physically get into the warehouse and get their house back in order.
I should note here that our GM is not from a food industry background and really does put production needs before quality.
Does anyone have any materials or references to how a quality department is set up or the roles and responsibilities that are generally expected of quality and how that meets with production? I haven't found anything to that level online or in my university notes so I can't work out if I am actually shirking a responsibility here in expecting GM/ production to lead this.
As for going to cry to management- I have found this to often be the only way to get something done in this organization, and it is only when I kick up a fuss that I can get some real movement on outstanding issues. Whilst this is effective it also upsets people as the CEO will usually go a little too crazy when I may just have been looking for a slightly more gentle push from the person they will actually listen to. I don't suppose this technique is is recommended in management theory, so any advice on how to deal with colleagues at or above my level who I don't think are pulling their weight would also be good! (GM just came to see me- after putting 4 personnel on this today they have blitzed the suspect rows and found 2 items to dispose of, so I see that this method does get results....)
We are BRC certified- still on V7 so we don't have the extra emphasis on the food safety culture of V8 from that, but of course it is irrelevant as we should have a culture of food safety regardless.
As always, your opinions and advice would be very gratefully received!
Ben