What to do? what to follow?
1.- Map your supply and production chain towards STANDARDISATION, Collect information to describe your supply chain on a product basis from a food inspection perspective. What needs to be checked, which are the critical bootle-necks and how to control them?… globalization is a factor that goes hand in hand with standardizing processes and benchmarks for throughput, yield and quality. But variations can be an extreme barrier to standardization, and it can be a very high and costly one.
2.- Monitor and set your stakeholders expectation to be fulfilled, When you look at food safety, removing poor quality and unsafe material has become far more important, and will continue to be important. The detection and removal on-time , of the “under” quality materials is something that is a factor throughout the entire supply chain. the global advent of social media has exacerbated the demand for quality infinitely. Now, a single online post can create a brand and public relations disaster with long-lasting impact.
3.- Create a blueprint of “Inspection hotspots” in your chain, and make it excel . The companies ability to adapt to changes in demand, standardization and quality largely falls on the shoulders of quality based technologies who have to control , monitor and execute your strategies and operate your production, making equipment requirements to be more and more complex. Processes get more and more complex, and consumer demands will be always going higher, so technologies have to overtake those demands, reaching unprecedented levels of analysis, time response and precision, with total robustness and reliability.
4.- Select and assume the more efficient technologies and investments within a Long term perspective: optimize relentlessly, from the Inspection to the sort to the tech to the process. Seek technologies , from NIR ( companies like POLYTEC, FOSS, PERTEN or BUCHI ), to HYPER-SPECTRAL ( companies like IRIS Engineering , EVK or SPECIM ), to FTIR ( as GASERA ) to VISIBLE control ( Sorting technologies like MULTISCAN, SESOTEC or CIMBRIA ) , that let you remove what you have to, and not any more. Invest in technologies that last and are enabling you to easily upgrade, rather than replace, find the right partners either internally and externally to bring the plan up to speed, and specially relevant , to go beyond in your food and drink production control , using optical FYLA‘s white laser based platforms.