Cleaning is whose responsibility?

As management wanted quality team to lead cleaning together with production team on cleaning in milk powder factory. I thought it is responsibility of production team and then quailty department goes to verification and validation on them. Quality team should not involved on cleaning. Please enlighten me if i'm wrong.

You're right. 

As far as I know, Quality Assurance personnel are responsible on the validation and verification of cleaning programs. If you're going to participate, overseeing that the whole process is being done properly by production may be enough. Don't engage your self to much with them, for they may assume (production personnel).

But if the management really insist, I think arguing may be pointless. After all, they are still the boss (which really sucks  )

Hello nick,

Joan is right, Cleaning must be done by production and be validated and verified by QA. But sometimes it also depends on the size of the company. Small companies do multi-tasking, so sometimes or most of the time QA personnel is tap to help and assist the cleaning. 

regards,

redfox

From an organizational standpoint it's splitting hairs, but from a verification standpoint the person responsible for the cleaning labor should not also be validating their cleaning, since you have an incentive to grade yourself higher. This does not make friends however, and you should partner with your production team to use your validation data to identify top performers and make shared goals.

This is wholly a decision by each company.  Many medium to large companies have a dedicated sanitation group which can be managed by Quality Assurance or Production/Operations.  Some companies may have operations do the cleaning/sanitation after the production is completed.  Some may have QA assisting or doing the cleaning.

The bottom line is that the cleaning sanitation program needs to be sufficient, verified, and validated however that may be.  The biggest challenge I see with this is getting the resources and time needed to clean.  In every company I've worked for resources and time always seem to be the challenges in maintaining an effective sanitation program; not who is responsible for the cleaning/sanitation.

Hi All,

I have to say that I have never encountered a factory where QA Operatives are used to scrub floors and tables.

My instinctive auditorial reaction to such would be that this Company do not understand how to make meaningful use of a QA Department.

Hi,

fully agree with Charles.

I never have seen a company where cleaning was organized in this manner, not in food, not in pharmaceutical, not in medical device industry.

Rgds

moskito

I agree with the OP and many of the posts on this thread.  Quality should be used to verify and validate cleaning practices with a dedicated sanitation team or dedicated production personnel trained on and performing the cleaning activities on a regularly prescribed basis.  

To the OP, is this something you feel you could bring up with your Sn. Management? This is not a good use of Quality's time, which from my experience is already very precious.