Digitizing Corrective Actions
May 22, 2024
In this video, Neogen Digital Solutions Product Manager Amy Wilder shows you how to use Neogen Analytics to quickly review and automate your operation’s corrective actions in real-time.
Video Transcript
TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics
TITLE CARD: Digitizing Corrective Actions — Amy Wilder, Digital Solutions Product Manager, Neogen
[Music]
Dan Dwyer: Amy, how can Neogen Analytics help you digitize your corrective actions?
[The screen shows a view of the Neogen Analytics screen titled "Settings". Sub categories include "Application Settings" and "Module Settings". Videos of Amy Wilder and Dan Dwyer are displayed in a side column next to the shared screen. The cursor moves to a selection under "Module Settings" and selects "CA Protocols" from the sub menu. The Neogen Analytics screen then shows a page titled "CA Protocols". The cursor selects "Add Item". The screen changes to a page titled "Configuration CA Protocol". The cursor moves to the menu tab for "Filters".]
Amy Wilder: Upon you know onboarding the application you would have the ability to identify your Corrective Action Protocols. You would then establish through filters. When does this corrective action need to be applied? Is it site specific? Is it analyte specific? Is it zone specific?
[The cursor moves to the menu tab for "Activities". The screen shows a view of the Neogen Analytics screen titled "Environmental Settings". The Neogen Analytics screen then shows a page titled "CA Protocols" with "CA Protocols" highlighted in the first sub menu tabs and "Activities" highlighted in the secondary menus tab. A table of data is below with the column headings "Order:", "Active", "Name", "Notes", and "Attachment".]
Amy: And then you would outline your activities that need to be completed in order to close out your corrective action. So there might be some cleaning. there might be some investigation.
[The cursor moves to the side menu tab for "Environmental Testing". The submenu includes "Floorplans", "Test Points", Sample Analyses", and "Corrective Actions". "Corrective Action" is selected. The new screen goes to a page labeled "List of Open Corrective Actions". The table shown has column headers "ID", "Floorplan", "Location", "Test Point", "Description", "Collection Date", "Sample Analysis", "Analysis Type", "Status", "Assigned To", and "Actions".]
Amy: Upon receiving a result, a non-conformance or an out of spec, either through manual entry, through automation with integration, as an example, the software would automatically trigger a corrective action. And this corrective action is triggered again based upon what you've configured in settings. So if it's a Listeria failure, it knows exactly what activities, retests,—things like that—need to be completed.
[The cursor clicks the Corrective action and shows a new screen. Amy begins speaking as a new employee and how they may easily interpret the data shown. She clicks through a series of pages as she describes the process.]
Amy: I know that I have a failure on my drain number five here. I've been asked to go out and work through this corrective action. I'm new. I don't know the policy, right? That's okay. I don't need to. Settings is going to drive that for me and within the application I would open up this corrective action and see the type of failure it was. In this next section it's going to tell me the activities that need to be completed to close it out. So there is a clean and sanitize. Upon clicking this "i" I could see some additional notes, maybe open up the SOP associated with this type of clean. You could capture notes upon completing this activity. You would mark it complete, as you would the remaining remaining activities, and then the software is going to automatically generate a sample analysis for my retests. Once both of these sections are complete, the software would recognize that this corrective action is officially passing the criteria established in settings and as, an individual who's completing these, you don't need to know exactly what it is because it's going to tell you. Here's what you need to do. It will generate these automatically for me so I just follow the software and the steps listed here. Once this is deemed complete, the software would automatically push it into this for review stage for someone to review the activities, the notes, attachments, things like that, and sign off. They could verify that this was complete, mark it complete, and once they do that, it would then move over into the historical section.
[Amy stops speaking as an example new employee and summarizes the ease of use.]
Amy: So you don't need to know, maybe, what your policy states, what all the activities are, how many retests, the software will tell them upon opening up each and every corrective action.
TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics
[Music]
Digitizing food safety workflows and data goes far beyond eliminating paper binders and manually updated spreadsheets. Housing data electronically is certainly a benefit of going digital, and having the ability to instantly recall testing information from facilities across your entire organization is very powerful. The real power in going digital, however, is automating the launch and management of your corrective actions.
Converting your food safety program to a digital platform activates your standard operating procedures (SOPs) in real time. Instead of delaying actions while manually interpreting the next steps, your food safety plan is programmed into your data platform such that your team is prompted digitally to initiate corrective actions immediately, thereby enabling mitigation of an issue before it becomes a costly problem.
With tight budgets and limited resources, food manufacturers do not always have the time to wait for a person to interpret data, discover a problem, and initiate a corrective action. As soon as adverse testing results are known, the data itself can—and should—dictate how to proceed based on your food safety policies and immediately initiate appropriate activities with the right people.
Food safety plans take a significant amount of effort to develop and support. Every second that passes from when an adverse result is known until remediation activities begin is critical to the ability to manufacture safe, viable products while achieving production and quality goals. A delay in initiating a corrective action can be the difference between a minor inconvenience and an expensive scrap event, or in the worst case, a recall.
You have already put your expertise to work in developing your food safety plan. You crafted that plan by detailing the specialized steps that should be taken in case of adverse testing results. Your team’s expertise is made more effective when it can be applied in a timely fashion. By digitizing and automating your corrective actions, you can activate your food safety plan and put your data to work with you. For example, a sample analysis that results in an adverse diagnostic finding should trigger the appropriate corrective action based on your SOPs. The right people should automatically be informed and directed to the right activities at the right time, rather than waiting to act until a manual review or meeting occurs.
A digital food safety testing platform enables more than just automation of corrective action triggers. As such actions are completed, the right people can be notified in real time to review and verify that the right steps have been taken to address the issue. Audit preparation becomes streamlined as your corrective actions are tied to every adverse result in your digital audit log, which also updates in real time. This eliminates the need to share spreadsheets across facilities as all data is housed in a single cloud application, accessible from any browser-capable device at any time.
Digitizing corrective actions supports a preventative or proactive approach to food safety that enables a more efficient production cycle with fewer disruptions. Automation of your food safety plan allows your corrective actions to do what they are intended to do with the greatest possible opportunity for success. To see the power of automation for yourself, contact Neogen to have our experts show you how digitized corrective actions can bring your food safety plan to life with Neogen Analytics.
To learn more, sign up for a specialized demonstration today!
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Category: Food Safety, Consumer Goods, Dietary Supplements, Food & Beverage, Pet Food, Allergens, Microbiology, Pathogens, Environmental Monitoring