Managing a food processing plant is a demanding job involving tight production timelines, high-risk employee safety, staff schedules, quality assurance, and more. Add to this, increasing pressures around food safety and the growing amount of documentation that is required by regulators to prove a clear strategy and compliance.
The rules and regulations around the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) continue to evolve, including the announcement by the FDA about its ‘New Era of Smarter Food Safety’. The agency’s newest initiative emphasizes the need for better technology to help enhance preventative food safety measures across numerous areas of the industry.
The regulatory requirements are only going to become more stringent and traditional paper-based logs will soon not be enough to support the deeper level of documentation needed for compliance. And the impact of negative sanitary issues, will become more and more critical for processing businesses. Thus, it is important to make sure your sanitation team is thinking ahead and prepared to support the new era of food safety.
Staying two steps ahead
As a business committed to leading the next generation of food safety, PSSI is dedicated to helping its partners stay two steps ahead by investing in new technologies and talent that go above and beyond traditional sanitation services.
Among those, PSSI recently launched a new digital data reporting and notification platform across more than 500 plant sites the company supports. The company’s Real-Time Performance Metrics (RPM) platform supports efficient data collection, storage, visualization, and reporting for key sanitation data, coupled with triggered alerts, notifications, tasks and corrective action tracking. The platform not only helps streamline data tracking and reporting needed from a compliance standpoint, but it enables sanitors to proactively respond to any changes or concerns related to the sanitation process in real-time.
- Proactive Protection – The RPM platform provides PSSI site managers and other key stakeholders real-time access to critical sanitation data on digital devices. This data is used across a facility so they can more quickly identify and correct potential sanitation issues during a cleaning. It tracks data that can significantly impact the effectiveness of a sanitation process, including time, water temperature, titration (i.e. concentration of chemical agents), and mechanical force (i.e water pressure). The enhanced visibility to this critical information and the ability to be more proactive drastically improves the effectiveness of each sanitation process ultimately creating a safer environment and safer products.
- Transparency and Accessibility – The data and corrective actions recorded by the PSSI team through the RPM platform is exactly the type of documentation regulators are looking for to validate the consistency and effectiveness of each cleaning process. Every PSSI partner has access into the system to see what is happening in their plant on a real-time basis, as well as notifications to alert them if there is a need for additional support or resources related to the issue. This provides significant positive impact against potential down time to ensure production stays on schedule. Partners are able to generate date-specific reports quickly and easily to support any inspections, compliance reviews or other food safety concerns.
Many of PSSI’s employees have first-hand experience working inside processing plants and understand the growing demands plant managers continue to face on a daily basis. Especially demands related to food safety, the foundational element for operating any food processing business. PSSI understands that compliance delays or hiccups could threaten business partnerships, or worse, create risky food safety issues that threaten the health of consumers or your brand.
PSSI is committed to transparency that enables plant managers to have visibility into the exact steps their contract sanitation partner is taking on a nightly basis to protect their plant, customers and brand. This is why PSSI has taken steps to provide the right innovative tracking and reporting tools to ensure thorough data is readily available to simplify and streamline any reporting or audit preparation requirements needed to keep processors on time and on target.