A Rationale to Digitize Food Safety Testing

October 19, 2023

Food safety issues not only present health risks, but more commonly they can and do become very expensive from a production / operations standpoint. Join Amy Wilder as she explains how Neogen Analytics can have a significant impact by helping to limit downtime in food manufacturing.

 

Video Transcript

TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics

[Music]

TITLE CARD: A Rationale to Digitize Food Safety Testing

TITLE CARD: Amy Wilder, Digital Solutions Product Manager, Neogen

[A screen shows videos of Amy Wilder and Dan Dwyer speaking.]

Dan Dwyer: Amy, how can adopting a digital food safety data platform help an organization become more preventative, more proactive?

Amy Wilder:  When we have the ability to trigger notifications within the platform, for those that need to know, but, again, for those that maybe are just looking for some sort of report. Whether it's on a regular basis or not.

[The screen shows the Insights page from the Neogen Analytics platform. The Insights page has an alert window open that is titled "Broadcast". The cursor clicks the button labelled "Create New". Another alert window pops up with a list of contacts to chose from. The cursor chooses a contact and selects the radio button labelled "Alert" under the "Continuous Schedule" options for the broadcast type. The cursor clicks "Add Alert Delivery Rules". A new alert window opens titled "Delivery Rules". The cursor selects "#Nonconformances" from the "Delivery Rule" drop-down menu. Other options include "#Tests", "%Nonconformance", "SampleWeek", and "Analysis Type".]

Amy: We have something called broadcasting where we can broadcast reports that can be custom. My colleague Dan or my manager Sue needs this information. Maybe it's my entire team. It's information that we review every Thursday morning on our staff meeting. We can take that information and send it out as a broadcast to those that need it.

[A screen shows videos of Amy Wilder and Dan Dwyer speaking.]

Amy: Maybe it's just coming to myself so I can review it first and then have talking points for the folks that are also getting the information or maybe on my staff meeting. We've got it in real time as we need it. So there's an opportunity with Neogen Analytics when we think about aggregating data whether it's one analyte or multiple in one place.

[A screen shows the floorplan view in Neogen Analytics with green, yellow, red, and blue dots signifying test results on a map of a manufacturing facility.]

Amy: You can certainly start start to see with visualization on the floor, for example, or in "Insights" which is where all of the reports are housed.

[A screen shows the Insights view in Neogen Analytics with a line graph and data table.]

Amy: You know potential trends as well as areas that maybe are resulting in "Out of Spec" or "Failed" results.

[A screen shows videos of Amy Wilder and Dan Dwyer speaking.]

Amy: Having visibility to that all in one place would allow me to kind of dig into the software to see what's exactly happening. Instead of potentially looking at my Excel spreadsheet, I have different types of functionality within Neogen Analytics to see that. Allow myself or my team to be proactive in really looking at all of the data that it's capturing and aggregating in real time.

[Music]

TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics

 

We hear a lot about the efficacy of food safety testing. The benefits of having a well-rounded and robust testing program are many and well documented. We also hear that the industry has chosen “not to compete on food safety,” and this is an appropriate stance — much like the healthcare industry has chosen to do. Sharing advances and treatment program outcomes has been an immense boon to healthcare practitioners. The advent of a major digital transformation — the electronic health record — has enabled information sharing and advances that have literally saved lives and avoided disastrous outcomes.

In the same way, the role and function of food safety teams are experiencing a similar renaissance and digital transformation. The advent of digitized and automated testing programs can help food producers avoid major disruption. But unlike the human healthcare industry experience, food producers must also focus on production deadlines and meeting objectives within an incredibly tight financial margin.

Food safety issues not only present health risks, but more commonly, they can and do become very expensive from a production/operations standpoint. This area is where the opportunity exists to drive more leadership buy-in to the benefits of digitizing food safety testing and sanitation programs.

Think of a production environment. Every hour of downtime for an impacted production line or piece of machinery equates to thousands of dollars lost (or much more). The additional costs, when added up, are staggering:

  • Cost of Raw Materials – The ingredients and supplies used to produce a contaminated run were wasted.
  • Production Costs – The expenses related to powering, operating, and maintaining related production lines have not yielded results.
  • Labor Costs – Line worker, maintenance worker, and contractor time was wasted.
  • Scrap/Waste Costs – Removal and disposal of contaminated product and the labor involved in this must be added.
  • Re-work Costs – Fulfilling the original order must still be completed! Add the first three categories above a second time to identify the re-work cost.
  • Customer Relationship Risk – Missed production deadlines can mean missed customer order fulfillment. Customers may turn to alternative suppliers instead of your company.
  • Regulatory Risk – Hopefully you and your internal team caught the issue. If not, fines and added scrutiny are just the start of your worries.

This is why it is critical to become preventative. The list above indicates the actual things we are trying to prevent – the possibility of a recall, or worse, a consumer becoming ill. Becoming preventative means that you first must be able to gain visibility to the root causes of issues, see trends that may lead to real problems, and take action before expensive outcomes occur.

Digitizing and automating your testing and sanitation programs are critical steps toward becoming preventative and alleviating food safety–driven performance issues. The following illustrates how production performance can deliver return on investment (ROI) and be impacted via a digitally transformed process.

Production Performance

When a pathogen is found to be present within a production environment, especially if it is discovered within a food contact zone or surface, a series of corrective actions must be launched. These actions can include a complex number of interdependent steps to ensure that the pathogen is removed, and verification of this result is documented and logged for future audit and inspection purposes. As corrective actions are being deployed, disruption to production is an almost certain result.

According to KPMG1, 42 percent of food and beverage executives feel that losing share to lower-cost producers is the biggest threat to their business model, and 46 percent say the cost of inputs or merchandise is the greatest threat to their company’s profit margins. To optimize operations, organizations have invested in automated systems that help keep plants running at top capacity.

However, the occurrence and frequency of food safety issues increase the risk of system downtime. If a pathogen detection occurs, for example, a machine, conveyor system, or other equipment may need to be temporarily shut down for unplanned cleaning, or in extreme cases, torn down altogether for deep cleaning.

The research shows that downtime can reach an astounding 500 hours per facility annually, leading to overall costs that some studies put in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 per hour on average. In extreme cases, an entire line could be shut down while more extensive investigatory testing is performed. This all results in production delays that inevitably yield an unexpected cost to the business.

The following equation shows the math involved in measuring the business impact of gaining 90 minutes of production uptime per week. For the purposes of this analysis, the sample organization depicted operates two facilities where there are assumptions that downtime equates to a cost value of $30,000 per hour, and that both plants experience an average of 90 minutes of downtime per week that can be regained.

Using the ROI figure from the equation above, the annual savings for the sample organization are significant:

$90,000/week
X52weeks
$4,680,00/year

 

And that is just two facilities!

The financial impact of reducing production downtime by just 90 minutes per week can be dramatic once the week-after-week results are added up. This is one of the most devastating costs that food manufacturers and processors face, yet it often goes undetected as teams focus on problem-solving in the moment and chalk up downtime simply as an accepted cost of doing business.

Downtime does not have to be “just a part of doing business,” however. By eliminating just a few delayed starts or unplanned re-cleaning instances, as shown above, the financial impact of reducing production downtime can be significant.

To see how you can limit downtime by integrating Neogen Analytics into your processes, schedule a demo today!

1 http://www.kpmg.com/us/en/topics/2013-outlook-surveys/pages/2013-food-beverageindustry-outlook-survey.aspx


Category: Food Safety, Consumer Goods, Dietary Supplements, Food & Beverage, Pharmaceutical & Biotech, Microbiology, Pathogens, Environmental Monitoring