Food Safety / HACCP

Food Processing facilities are under increasing regulatory and market pressure to ensure food safety standards are continuously met. While not all food processors are currently required to have a HACCP plan in place, in light of recent food safety incidents, the United States government appears poised to pass legislation mandating the adoption of more stringent food safety regulation and compliance documentation by food processors in general. Many companies see this impending regulation, coupled with the business case for lower brand risk and lost sales, and choose to implement a voluntary HACCP plan. Processors implementing a HACCP system, however, are faced with a number of challenges associated with the increased data collection and storage requirements, as well as the need to generate timely and accurate compliance and reports. Challenges include:

  • Enforcing HACCP schedule compliance – Are workers doing HACCP inspections on each line at every required time (Startup, Shift change, changeover, etc.)?
  • Ensuring that the HACCP inspection route is followed– Are workers going to the critical control points in the process during each inspection time interval?
  • Ensuring consistent corrective action is followed by workers – Do all worker follow consistent procedures to address out-of-control situations?
  • Managing the substantial record keeping and documentation requirements- Storing and making accessible years of inspection records, compiling compliance records and reporting on corrective actions.

Key AuditMatic Benefits

AuditMatic helps to ensure an effective HACCP plan by providing:

AuditMatic Score CardHACCP Schedule Compliance Reporting
Using Process Compliance Monitoring, you can configure the HACCP inspections requirements that are required during production time on each line or facility area and have AuditMatic automatically generate your process compliance scorecards in real-time without manual reconciliation, giving immediate feedback to stakeholders on HACCP schedule compliance and allowing hours of labor to be redirected to more productive effort.

HACCP Inspection Route Enforcement
AuditMatic uses rugged handheld computers with barcode or RFID reader capability as the data capture device for HACCP inspection data. AuditMatic can require inspectors to scan food safe barcodes or RFID tags at critical control points along the inspection route, ensuring that the inspection route is followed and that inspectors truly visit each critical control point in person.

Consistent Corrective Action
AuditMatic can be easily configured (with no programming skills required) to provide inspectors with reference documents and with contextual decision support logic at their fingertips when they encounter out-of-normal operating conditions. Accumulated best practices can be easily built into the AuditMatic data collection form to make each inspector act like your best and brightest.

AuditMatic DashboardInformation Management
AuditMatic is a database driven application offering the latest in web reporting capabilities. AuditMatic can provide authorized stakeholders immediate access to years of accumulated inspection forms and insightful reports from their desktop web browsers as well as issue e-mail alerts when out-of-the-ordinary HACCP issues occur to ensure rapid and comprehensive corrective action.
AuditMatic in Food Safety HACCP
Food Safety Play AuditMatic Tour

The seven principles of HACCP are:

  • Principle 1: Conduct a hazard analysis. Potential hazards associated with a food are identified, along with measures to control those hazards.
  • Principle 2: After evaluating all processing steps, determine the critical control points (CCPs). CCPs are points in a food's production and processing at which significant hazards can be controlled or eliminated.
  • Principle 3: Establish critical limit(s) for each CCP. Each CCP must operate within specific parameters to ensure the hazard is being appropriately and effectively controlled.
  • Principle 4: Set up systems to monitor each CCP. Monitoring involves defining how the CCPs will be assessed, performing the monitoring at the appropriate time intervals, determining who will perform the monitoring and finally maintaining the proper monitoring records.
  • Principle 5: Establish corrective actions. When a critical limit is not met (a process deviation), proper actions must be taken. These can be both short- and long-term corrective actions. Appropriate records must be maintained.
  • Principle 6: Establish verification procedures. Verification is used to confirm that the system is working properly and that procedures outlined in the HACCP plan are being followed.
  • Principle 7: Record-keeping and documentation. This includes all records required in the various parts of the HACCP plan, as well as other key records such as sanitation logs, supplier agreements, and shipping documents.

Source – US Food and Drug Administration
Wed Mar 10 2010 05:56:16 GMT-0700 (MST)