What is HACCP? Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points
SageData is based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Definition
HACCP is a way of controlling a process to ensure that the resulting products comply with predefined Quality Assurance targets. HACCP today is frequently applied to food production, but the concept has its origins in general manufacturing.
History - the problem
The concepts embedded in the HACCP programme have been around for fifty years or more. Our company president had personal knowledge of one project which nicely illustrates the concepts. This was a high tech manufacturing company that initially operated without the benefit of HACCP. The accepted and traditional approach was to manufacture a lot of widgets, test them to identify the thirty percent that do not work, and pay skilled technicians to fix them.
There are lots of problems with this approach. It needs a lot of people to do the repairs. The reworked product is less reliable, as a consequence of damage inflicted during the repair. Production costs are unknown. Production schedules are unpredictable.
The solution
The situation was resolved by a new production manager. The previous management team had invested a million dollars in developing a robot, hoping to replace the expensive and unpredictable fault finding technicians. To emphasize (somewhat dramatically) the change in direction, the new production manager personally picked up the million dollar robot and placed it in the dumpster. He then started a whole new approach, based on the same principals that have led to what we call HACCP today.
The theory
His theory was simple. If a widget does not work, there is a fault, and it can only be in the design, the components, or the assembly process. Nothing else. Put the other way, if the design is good, the components are good, and a good assembly process is followed, then the widget must work. It has no other option.
The result
Applying this principle instead of the million dollar robot moved the defect at test
from
above
thirty percent to less than one percent. At this point, defective product need never
be repaired. It can be analyzed to determine the cause of the failure and prevent it from
recurring,
and
then discarded.
This is an effective process for making electrical widgets, and is a prime cause of the low
price and
high reliability that we expect of electronics today.
In the food industry
This concept is also valuable in the food industry, perhaps more so here than in other types of production. Here we do not have the luxury of testing prepared food to see if it is going to make us ill. So we ensure that we have good components (the ingredients), good design (the recipe) and a good production process (which includes hygienic preparation, cooking and storing at the right temperature). And this one of the places where HACCP is applied today.
SageData can help
So what is the link between SageData and HACCP? We provide data collection, analysis and reporting tools to help management ensure that an effective process is being followed, and we can provide the evidence of compliance required to satisfy both internal and external audits.
We would be happy to share our ideas, technical solutions and best practices with you.
If you found this useful, you might also want to review:
-
an introduction to barcode technology
- an introduction to RFID
- mobile data collectors
-
consulting
services: barcodes and their applications
QAOK4367
