In 1947, just a few years after the end of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur asked a young government statistician named W. Edwards Deming to come to Japan to help prepare the war-weary country's first census. Deming had already made a name for himself in public service by being part of the partnership that revolutionized sampling techniques used by the U.S. Census, but his free time was spent thinking about industry, quality, and the application of statistics to both.
By chance, a colleague offered Deming the opportunity to speak to a group of Japanese business leaders and engineers; that opportunity turned into a system that revolutionized modern industrial production: Kaizen, or "change for the better."
Getting Lean When Times Are Uncertain
Given how much of modern food safety can be traced back to Deming’s work on statistical process controls, his story is always important to the industry. But when the economy is particularly unpredictable and chaotic, it's the Kaizen part (and its offshoots Just-In-Time and Lean) that might be the most relevant to food production executives and food safety professionals.
When tomorrow feels like a black box, industry tends to move toward Lean principles — cutting waste, cutting inventory, and prioritizing efficiency. That might be relatively easy for a car manufacturer, but how can food producers institute Lean Operations practices while maintaining strict food safety standards?
Deming and the legacy of his work, the Kaizen system, have some food safety tips to ensure the utmost quality while keeping operations agile and ready for anything.
1. Building Strong Partnerships From the Jump
One of the biggest obstacles to going lean in food production is ensuring that every ingredient meets food safety criteria. This is challenging at the best of times when running planned and relatively consistent deliveries, but it's magnified when deliveries come as needed and in as-needed quantities.
Japanese companies like Toyota, which turned Kaizen into an art form, faced similar challenges in ensuring quality for incoming parts. Their solution? Build strong relationships with vendors, establish quality guidelines for them, help them to achieve those guidelines, and then regularly audit them to ensure their processes work.
Food producers can do something similar to ensure food safety and quality. The key is to start a strong relationship with clear expectations and standards based on statistical process control methodologies. Your vendors should be partners, working toward a common goal — perfect food safety for everything they deliver. The specifics should be spelled out clearly, with transparent next steps in the event that a lapse in standards occurs on either side of the partnership.
2. Helping Each Other Do Better
To ensure that quality stays high, Kaizen recommends that you work closely with your vendor, not just to make sure your processes run smoothly, but that theirs do as well. This may be difficult when your vendor is a giant multinational, but even then, an alignment between food safety teams can be reached.
Once the work has been put in, it’s important to diligently audit those processes both on your side and on theirs to ensure they are followed consistently and improvements are constantly added. This is another key component of Kaizen — affirmative and proactive improvement from every person and company that touches a product. Every process must be seen as open for auditing and review by anyone who takes part in it. This might mean more work for food safety professionals in auditing vendors, but fewer quality control and food safety issues down the line make up for it.
3. Jidoka and Safer Food
That leads us to the next critical step for implementing a safe, just-in-time (JIT) food manufacturing facility: the idea of Jidoka, or automation with a human touch. Growing out of Deming's PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) framework, Jidoka empowers anyone involved with a process, food manufacturing, and food safety, in this case, to stop all production whenever a deviation occurs and keep it on hold until the root cause is identified and fixed.
The idea of stopping a production line entirely for a single issue up- or down-stream might be anathema to modern 24/7 production facilities. Still, it's absolutely essential for ensuring that lean operations meet food safety standards. A single contamination or case of cross-contact can cause millions of dollars (and hundreds of lives) in harm if it makes it to consumers. Stopping a line, by comparison, seems downright cost-effective. As manufacturers go lean, empowering workers to call time out when something goes wrong can be the difference between thriving and experiencing a catastrophic food safety failure.
4. Standardized Food Safety, Just-In-Time
The last food safety tip for food producers looking to go lean is to implement standardization and consistency. Toyota managed to become renowned for their quality because of these two core principles: standardized processes and just-in-time inspections.
Food producers should always practice standardization of process using statistical control methods, but these methods become absolute necessities in a lean environment. With production happening on much tighter schedules and with much more sporadic starts and stops to respond to market needs, it's the standardization of processes that allows manufacturers to keep up the pace without letting quality slip.
This is especially true when implementing just-in-time inspections for incoming ingredients. As we talked about earlier, inspecting deliveries can be challenging at the best of times. But when those deliveries can come at any time and for any quantity, it can be downright grueling. Without strong, effective processes, just-in-time inspections turn into a growing backlog that risks creating hazardous conditions. And without proper inventory control, a single snag in the JIT logistical chain can snowball into serious food safety lapses.
That being said, when incoming inspections are standardized, choreographed, and practiced, lean operations transform from chaos into an intricate ballet, and food safety always performs the leading role. For lean food production operations to work, the goal can only be: Inspect every delivery, every time, in the exact same way, and continuously get better.
Making Sense Out of Chaos
The economy might be up in the air, and the market may swing unpredictably from one direction to another, but food safety shouldn't, and cannot, be equally erratic. Food producers can better weather the storm of uncertainty if they go lean, but doing so requires some extra work upfront to ensure that food safety doesn't suffer. Taking some notes from Deming and the Kaizen approach can ensure that quality remains high while efficiency increases.
If you're considering a lean operations approach, don't leave food safety to chance. Find out how AIB International can help you manage the transition while prioritizing food safety — inquire about our Supplier and Vendor Audits and avoid just-in-time inventory turning into a just-in-time disaster.
