Digitizing your Environmental Monitoring Program

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Making the transition from spreadsheets and binders full of paper to a digitized environmental monitoring program is not just about making data easier to input and access.

It is about controlling risk.

Your Environmental Monitoring Program (EMP) program is your first line of defense in preventing costly issues, such as tear-downs and unplanned Clean-In-Place (CIP) activities. Food safety issues, such as recalls and outbreaks, are often tracked back to failures of the prerequisite programs such as pest control, personal hygiene, and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) among others. With prerequisite programs being elevated in importance by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), having the information to track the effectiveness of these programs is critical. EMPs perform this function and serve to provide data and insights to food safety teams to determine if sanitation controls, prerequisite programs and GMPs are, in fact, effectively lowering risk of contamination.

EMPs often involve a range of tests to determine both the presence of contaminants as well as the level of contamination. Test types can include ATP, allergen detection, pathogen detection and testing for many other specific contaminant types, all performed in multiple locations throughout the production area at varying frequencies. As food production methods are developed and modified over the course of time, the goal of the EMP can vary from the initial intent of the program. Over time, these programs are adjusted and altered to address specific problems, regulatory concerns, or customer requirements and can drift away from consistently adhering to the program’s initial intent and purpose.

Identifying hazards is a critical first step in developing a risk assessment and an impactful EMP, but truly understanding these hazards, and the likeliness, frequency and severity of the risks they present, relies heavily on collecting and analyzing data. Verification of environmental monitoring activities requires food safety teams to maintain accurate and up to date records, adding to the amount of manual organization and data management required to execute an HACCP-inspired monitoring program. Randomizing sample locations and scheduling daily testing activities are critical to the success of the program, but again are time-consuming, manual tasks that inherently introduce the potential for human-error and risk into the process.

Controlling risk requires data.

A successful EMP will produce data that alerts you and your team to the actions needed to prevent danger to public health, a regulatory compliance issue, a production-interrupting event, or a brand-damaging scenario from happening. In these instances, the only control that food safety professionals have starts when the data is in their hands. Food safety professionals are only able to act on the information that they have access to and the longer it takes data to get into their hands, the greater the danger of an issue potentially expanding to a costly and high-risk outcome.

Digitizing your EMP means that data will be in the hands of those who need it as soon as it is available. Data integrations with Labs/LIMS systems provide results in near real-time, enabling corrective actions to be launched the instant there is any risk detected. Automated workflows, alerts, and analytics can have a dramatic and tangible impact on the performance of the organization, from decreasing downtime and minimizing scrap, to almost eliminating time-consuming audit and reporting preparation. Many organizations are taking control of their EMPs through the digitization of their food safety data and their Environmental Monitoring Program with systems like Neogen Analytics. Convert your spreadsheet and paper based EMP into a digital program that reduces risk, eliminates several manual, administrative tasks, and allows your organization to become more preventative.

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