Automating Data Collection for Food Safety and Regulatory Compliance Audits
[ Original Article Published on February 23, 2017 at www.Enviromon.net ]
The demand for audits into manufactures and cold chains regarding food safety has surged in recent years due to changes in government mandates in response to an increasingly complex global food supply chain and expanding market requirements for supplier verification. As a result, the environmental conditions under which food is packaged, stored and prepared are becoming increasingly subject to stricter legislation, with penalties to be imposed if proper conditions are not maintained.
Maintaining the proper processes to comply with GMP standards and HACCP requirements are critical to ensuring compliance with food safety certifications. In addition, most food manufacturers and cold storage facilities must also keep regular records of temperatures inside their food storage areas for auditing purposes to ensure their products are properly preserved and safe for consumers.
A typical cold storage facility will likely contain coolers, freezers and deep coolers, all at a variety of temperatures. Manual processes of monitoring and recording temperature can be time-consuming and does not provide continuous logs which can result in missed temperature fluctuations or temporary faults and failures in equipment, potentially going undetected. Any such compromise to the integrity of storage temperature will ultimately affect the quality of your product, your business, and potentially put your customers’ health at risk.
Doing work “by hand” presents many obstacles that restrict the capabilities of an audit for both internal and external auditing teams inspecting food safety and storage regulation compliance. Lack of visibility and difficult to access data along with the large volumes of data to be analyzed present barriers to efficient collection and can lead to human and input errors in reporting.
Using temperature sensors to automate many of the tedious tasks for logging and collecting data greatly reduces the time required for audits and ensures high levels of accuracy and record completeness. Additionally, if any problems are detected during an audit that need to be resolved, new results can be recorded to demonstrable data during remediation tasks which ensures measurable progress over time.
View the original article and automated temperature monitoring systems from Enviromon.
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