How would you measure performance to Food Safety Objectives?
Hello Everyone,
We have developed four food safety objectives and I'm struggling on coming up with a way to measure our performance against each one.
1. No recalls or withdrawals associated with Food Safety or Quality
2. Overall reduction in customer complaints related to Food Safety
3. Product on QA Hold for operator-preventable reasons represents 5% or less of total pounds posted
4. 100% compliance to preventative control checks
I'd like to present this data in a chart but don't know which chart would be the best to demonstrate each objective.
Does anyone have any suggestions to share?
Thanks,
Nathan
I probably over simplify how I would display / demonstrate goals. The majority of the audience probalby isnt super versed in reading or understanding some of the complex graphs that I have seen. Heck, I dont get some of them.
1. I dont really like this as an objective or goal. The idea is that a majority of the employees can affect the goal and contribute. It is not really actionable. There is no way to track progress.
2-4. I would just use a simple line or bar graph. Each month report result, update chart, post . Add a line indicating the goal if desired.
Too simple?
I would create a scorecard on Excel. List the objectives, how they are measured/calculated and what your targets are in each column. Then have your months laid out - Jan-Feb-Mar etc. to track your actual performance. You can also include a YTD average and colour it red/amber/green.
No need for fancy graphs, a simple scorecard out to do it.
Not all of these will be measurable in a way that can be chart, but you can add descriptions/tables in your monthly meetings or however you are publishing/communicating your FSO performance. I put together monthly review meeting reports for my plants, and FSO's are something they discuss in each one. If I were in your shoes:
1. No recalls or withdrawals associated with Food Safety or Quality
This is one that I would update with a written statement each month: "Company records for recalls/withdrawals were reviewed from Jan 1, 2024 thru June 30th, 2024: No recalls or withdrawals were performed."
2. Overall reduction in customer complaints related to Food Safety
Admittedly, this is one an auditor could argue is too vague as it lacks a precise goal. But you could create a table with all of your customer complaints, keep it running from month to month and add a column to state whether the complaint is related to food safety. That could be graphed in a simple bar chart where you'd want to see the food safety related complaints decrease monthly. We do this with customer complaints, but it's not part of an FSO so we just graph by an assigned reason code to look for trends.
3. Product on QA Hold for operator-preventable reasons represents 5% or less of total pounds posted
Good goal here as it shows a clear percentage you wish to remain under. Enter all holds into a running spreadsheet, and have your graphs differentiate the operator-preventable reasons vs all others. Bar charts in Excel can display as percent values instead of the total numbers.
4. 100% compliance to preventative control checks
Could be chartable, but would require you to enter information from all the checks into an Excel table with a column showing compliant or non-compliant. You'd obviously want to only see compliant in the chart, any non-compliant check record would mean you are also out of compliance with your FSO.