Marianne O’Halloran
11 December 2016To whom it may ConcernCarol Cullen: Quality Assurance and Health and Safety ConsultantIce Construction Ltd is a small civil construction company which specialises in; bridge repairs and strengthening, tunnel repairs and lining, work around power generating facilities, small suspension bridge construction, timber bridge and boardwalk construction, concrete work, rock fall protection work and industrial abseiling.We therefore carry out a wide variety of work, much of which is specialist and hasdifficult access. We engaged Carol Cullen to prepare Health and Safety and Quality Assurance systemsto cover our variety of work. With her assistance we achieved Accident CompensationCorporation Tertiary Level accreditation and ISO 9001 quality accreditation in 2005. These are both externally audited systems. Carol continued to run our systems, take monthly health and safety meetings with all ourstaff and maintain our accreditations until she left for Australia in 2007.Yours faithfully,Marianne O’HalloranContracts Manager
Geerten Lengkeek
Carol is a very detailed person who is focused on the outcome and not easily led off-topic. She has conducted numerous audits in the plants I have ran and has always added value in terms of systems and process improvements. I highly recommend Carol as an auditor.
Ian Treloar
Carol Cullen was a member of our internal quality audit team in the early 1990’s. Our business was the supply of specialised milk products to the international dairy food ingredient business. Carol participated effectively in this team for more than 3 years. Her specialist skills were food safety, technical aspects of milk composition and laboratory test processes. She was a competent member of the audit team. Ian Treloar Global Supply Chain Integrity Specialist Fonterra Co-operative Limited
Trish Astwood
When Carol worked at Edgecumbe, the site had a group of internal auditors to help us meet the requirements for our customers and the ISO Quality Standards . A regular internal audit programme was in place and Carol was a key part of the audit team. Carol was always well prepared , objective & thorough in her approach. She went through the requirements in detail comparing what we were doing with what the standard required. Trish AstwoodCheese TechnicalManager, National Product Technical
I think I’ll arrange to poison some people while I’m at work today!
How many people in the food industry actually head to work with that thought in their minds? Not many. But we do have continual food safety breaches – and sometimes the people concerned don’t even realise what they are doing. Okay Production Managers, I’m going to show you how to manage your process, not the people, to get the most value from your Quality System . How to make your staff want to comply with the Quality System and be your best advocates for Food Safety. This will be useful to help you get results from the system to justify the money you spend on maintaining it. What you’ll learn is how to ensure everyone understands what the system is, why it’s there and why it’s important that everyone – from the CEO to the most junior operator – knows what their responsibilities are and how it affects the end results. These are the steps you need to take · Develop a training plan so that every member of staff knows: o What the system is designed to do o Why it’s necessary o What the impacts are if the system is not followed o What benefits can accrue for the company – and therefore the staff (make them aware that if the company succeeds and does well, their jobs are more secure and they are likely to have greater job satisfaction) · Follow up o Monitor the records o Give feedback to staff of wins and gains as well as problems o Discuss what has worked well and what needs to be improved o Reward those who are going above and beyond If you follow these steps everyone in the company will understand why the systems are in place and what their role is to ensure the company complies with all standards and continues to improve. What if there’s a better way than just sitting back and hoping that everything will fall into place and there are no unexpected problems. I hope this has been interesting and useful. It’s just a small part of ways I help clients to utilise their Quality Systems to do more than just pass an audit. Let’s have a chat if you would like to know more about how to apply these principles to your process.
Why do you have a Quality System?
We have a Food Safety and Quality System that passes audits – what next? Most people think that having a Quality System is just essential for compliance – no matter what industry you are in. As soon as people hear the term ‘Quality System’ they think it’s going to be complicated, expensive and make more work. In actual fact a good system can make life easier for you. Sure there will be some work to initially put a useful system in place that does more than just tick boxes. But, apart from passing inspections, there are three things a well-constructed Quality System can give you: 1. Compliance o Meet the required standard – Food Safety, WH&S, industry specific or customer requirements. Or have your own internal standard. You can still put a Quality System in place, even if you never get a third party auditor to assess it independently. The disciplines will make the business easier to manage and give you traceable records of results o Be assured that you have considered all the risks and put the necessary controls in place o Advertise the fact that you have a Quality System. Tell your customers. Give them the confidence that when they deal with you, you control your process and can guarantee QC1 product, service and delivery – first time every time 2. Consistency o Identify your process flow and document the way it will be done in a Standard Operating Procedure – ensure things are done the same way every time o Train all staff in the same way. Written procedures and training assessments mean that there will be no ‘slippage’ as new staff are shown what they need to do. Include some understanding of the process so that staff will recognise the need to follow the systems. Do all staff understand exactly what is expected of them? Is it clear not only what you want them to do – but why? o There are opportunities for improvement. Ensure staff understand that the system is not inflexible – if they think of an improved way of doing something there is room within the system to make suggestions. But, they MUST follow the system. Changes can be made in a controlled manner, one step at a time with an understanding of the consequences of one change before moving on to another one 3. Marketability / Improvement / Confidence o Measure outcomes o Rationalise routines o Rationalise procedures – reduce staff numbers if you have people monitoring processes, or use them o What can you do with data collected? You have to collect the data anyway, what is the point of just noting whether the result indicates product is in spec and filing it away? You can use data to identify improvements and increase efficiency. There are bound to be more advantages than those listed here. What ideas do you have? Reply in the comments. I’d love to hear what you are doing. Posted on September 21, 2016 by Llama Blue.
Scott Hern
Production Manager, Austchilli Pty Ltd To whom this may concern, This document is a testimonial for the professional work Carol has conducted within our company at Austchilli. Carol was contracted 6 years ago to fast track systems for our newly implemented retail processing line. Carol guided our team through the SQF and HACCP requirements. This commenced in assistance with the initial product formulations and testing regimes, through to the operations of process controls with staff and systems development. This also included system upgrades with changes to the standards, including document control and internal auditing. Customer visits and external audits is where Carol excelled. Our site achieving a rating of Excellence in our last audit. Carol ensured our company complied and supported with a well-structured corrective action process. Carol was also a key person in guiding our team to implement ‘High Risk’ compliance. For the last two years Carol has overseen our entire site with best practice of Quality standards in all divisions of our company. Carol has developed systems to action customer requests with heat testing of our chillies, product testing and coaching and educating our teams and developing a structured process to action customer complaints that details root cause analysis. Carol is a very professional individual that consistently delivers above expectations.
Recalls
Have you considered the number of things that could go wrong with your product during manufacture? This list is a timely reminder. Only in the last week around the world: http://www.foodqualitynews.com/Food-Outbreaks/FQN-weekly-food-recalls-April-2015/%28page%29/8
Worried About The Food You Eat?
What is your #1 worry about the food you eat? A recent study in Canada shows that E coli is still the top of the list. Read all the details
Careful What You Eat – Peanut Butter
You just have to be so careful. Were you aware that peanut butter contaminated with Salmonella from a US company may have been sold in Europe or could be available on the internet? Check out the full story here