FOOD SAFETY: Preventive Maintenance is good business
Building food safety into your operations will provide paybacks to your company.
Some food safety professionals seem to forget that we are in the food business.
Besides producing foods that are safe and wholesome, we need to work together
to assure that companies make money. I believe that managers need to look at food
safety, quality and sanitation programs as “cost savings centers,”
not cost centers.
One of the prerequisite programs for HACCP is preventive maintenance. Although
HACCP has given preventive maintenance programs a higher profile, they should
have been an integral part of your operations from the start. This applies not
just to the food industry, but to any business. The importance of preventive
maintenance and equipment made national headlines during the first week of April.
Someone at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport forgot to make sure that one
of the scanners at the security checkpoint was working properly. When the error
was detected, all passengers had to be cleared from the terminal and sent through
security again. You may say, “That is not the food industry,” but
I have seen similar occurrences in food plants. Operators can forget to turn
on a unit or even may turn something off if it begins to act funny, such as
a metal detector which suddenly begins kicking out product. The action should
have been to determine why there were so many kickouts, not make the assumption
the unit was misbehaving. Making sure something is working (and turned on) is
part of the overall maintenance program.