Managing Food Safety Testing and Sanitation Data Should Be Easier
November 02, 2023
James Quill discusses how Neogen Analytics provides access to information across all facilities and how that accessibility and immediacy can make a food manufacturer more proactive. He details a brand new feature that makes Neogen Analytics' reporting functionality even more powerful.
Video Transcript
TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics
[Music]
TITLE CARD: Data Should Be Easier
TITLE CARD: James Quill, Director, Product Operations & Customer Success, Neogen
[A screen shows videos of James Quill and Dan Dwyer speaking.]
Dan Dwyer: James, how can connecting workflows and reporting digitally impact an organization's ability to be preventative?
James Quill: Yeah, that's a good question. I actually have something up in the background. I think I'll share my screen.
[The screen shows the "Drill Anywhere" tab of the Insights page from the Neogen Analytics platform. A table of data, a bar graph, and a line graph are shown. Filters are set to a sample date of "Today Minus 12 Months".]
James: From day one, as you're starting to complete your sample analyses and you're doing your sampling and that data is coming back, the system is gathering all of that. And it's one facility. It's multiple facilities. It's 50 facilities. It doesn't matter. What's happening across the entire set of your facility base is that everyone is doing these actions. That is they are ordering samples to be done and everyone is receiving back results and everyone is completing actions in the application. So what's happening in the background where some some poor guy on a Wednesday, Thursday—every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—at the end of the month, would need to sit in a room by themselves and get on the phone and say, "Hey, have you sent me your spreadsheet yet?" or "Hey, have you sent me your spreadsheet yet?" or "Hey, did you give me access to your access database yet?" or "Hey, can I have your binder so I can enter all of this in?" And they're compiling this data and then they're normalizing it. That's what's happening in the background for everyone that's already using Neogen Analytics. But what I have up in front of us is—actually it's our latest and greatest report—it's my favorite now—which is the "Drill Anywhere" report. And so you'll notice here you know I have my "Today Minus 12 Months" filter. So I have about a year's worth of data. And then along the top, you actually see all of my different facilities. So, interestingly enough, I can see just in general over the last 12 months: how many total tests has each facility done; how many non-conformances have come back from those tests; and, then, what's the non-conformance percentage. And that's for each and every facility across the board.
[The cursor moves to select "Drill #1" in the data table. A dropdown menu shows with the title "Select Drill Anywhere Field" and submenu options "Dimensions" and "Time". The cursor selects the "Dimensions" submenu and another dropdown menu appears with options: "Analysis Group", "Analysis Type", "Floor Plan", "Location", "Test Method", Test Point Name", Test Reason", and "Zone". The cursor selects "Zone".]
James: So if I want to come in here and take a look at some more specifics—like for me some of my questions might be well how do these non-conformance percentages translate to zone or how do these non-conformance percentages translate based upon pre-op or post-op testing—and I want to start to take a look at that. I can actually click on this drill and I can select a new dimension and I can come down and say I want to break all of this out by zone. And what the what the the report is going to do is it's actually going to take all of this data and separate it out by zone for each and every facility.
[The data has a tab area titled Sites with different facilities listed like "1 - RTE Meat Facility". The data table now shows multiple rows. Each row is a zone. The cursor highlights the first row.]
James: First off, I want to see how things are going in Zone 1. I see that my non-conformance percentage is actually higher in my Zone 1 than it was as an average across all zones for my RTE meet facility.
[The cursor selects the Site "1 - RTE Meat Facility" causing a dropdown to appear with submenu options "Dimensions" and "Time". The page now shows a data table with a header titled "Month Start Date" and after are dates corresponding to the test columns.]
James: I'm going to come down I'm going to break this out over time. I'm gonna say, "You know what I want to look at this. Let's go month-by-month start date and now it has broken starting with 10/1/2022. It's broken all of my total number of tests, total number of non-conformances, with a calculated non-conformance percentage, broken out by Zone, on a month-over-month basis. Instead of saying, "Hey, give me a few days to pull together the data and I'm going to schedule a meeting." It's, "Hey, Dan, go get yourself a quick cup of coffee. I'm just going to slice and dice this. And when you come back we're going to have a conversation about how non-conformances have been—looks to be—steadily increasing with a sharp drop off for one month." You know in the future in your Zone Ones. And then we're going to start to dive into, "Well, what's been taking place?" "What sampling have you been doing?" "Who's been sampling?" and things like that.
[Music]
TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics
Managing Food Safety Testing and Sanitation Data Should Be Easier!
But this is not enough to build a business justification for digital adoption.
On three recent occasions, I have talked with food safety leadership at mid- to large-sized processors about their food safety testing and sanitation programs. While these organizations each face some unique challenges, there was a common theme that was clear among them all:
The creation of meaningful and timely reporting that is communicated effectively is typically just too cumbersome and manual today.
Other industry segments have digitally transformed the management of testing, diagnostic, and sanitation workflows. Take, for example, the healthcare industry, where the electronic health record (EHR) has become the standard means of system-wide communication of patient health and risk information. All testing and diagnostic data related to a patient is added to their EHR, making it far simpler for medical professionals to access and use in their assessment and determination of appropriate treatment programs and medications. In addition, the EHR makes it easier for health providers and payor organizations to access aggregate data to assess outcomes, risks, and other measures relevant to the organizations and the industry.
The banking industry, which years ago established online electronic banking as the standard means of transacting business, provides another digital transformation example. Each personal or business account holder can be seen as a source of transactions (analogous to a series of diagnostic results), where there is an expected outcome. The old way of banking, via manual, paper-based systems, had many limitations — including the risk of human error.
Resistance to change abounded in each of these examples, but the benefits of accelerating access to information, eliminating human error, and streamlining the ability to collect, assemble, and deliver impactful analytics, far outweighed the hesitancy to move forward with new digitally supported methods.
In the food and beverage manufacturing and processing industry, resistance has remained very strong within Food Safety & Quality functions. This resistance has largely been the result of food safety regulation being viewed as a “compliance” necessity — and it therefore does not receive the same attention as a business innovation that yields a business growth outcome.
New thinking on this conundrum is starting to generate a different perspective on the matter, however. Early adopters of digital food safety management platforms have found several business benefits, not just more streamlined compliance outcomes. At the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) event in Toronto this past July, a panel of food safety leaders from three different organizations discussed their experiences in adopting digital software for managing their testing programs. Excerpts from this event can be found in this video.
The main discussion centered on how each organization established a business justification for adoption of digital technology to manage their testing programs. Here are three examples of many that arose in the meetings I had recently, and in the discussions with the panelists at IAFP:
- Time-to-Information: Digitally connecting testing workflows with the lab and triggering instant alerts as non-conforming results are detected is a major benefit. This can transform a team’s approach from reactive to being truly proactive and “preventative.” Catching issues before they blossom yields a huge business benefit — for example, the ability to launch and complete a Corrective Action without disrupting production.
- Operational Up-time Gains: Many organizations see an unplanned clean-in-place (CIP) process or tear-down as “a cost of doing business.” It does not have to be this way in all cases. When testing data reveals a trend that can be detected before it results in a major cleaning and operational delay, the financial benefits are profound.
- Team Efficiency and Fulfillment: Food safety technicians and leaders alike focus too much time on manually entering diagnostic result data and manipulating spreadsheets for reporting. Digital automation shifts the emphasis from data entry and preparation to analyzing and solving issues. This shift results in higher job satisfaction, less turnover, and lower costs in hiring and retraining.
If you are challenged with building a business justification for adoption of digital technology in your organization, perhaps the thinking in this blog or the links provided above will provide a starting point. We would be delighted to engage with you and your team to learn more about your unique challenges.
Click the "Learn More" button to schedule some time with us.
Category: Food Safety, Consumer Goods, Dietary Supplements, Food & Beverage, Pet Food, Allergens, Microbiology, Pathogens, Environmental Monitoring