How better data will help you see the big picture in your food safety management system

A couple of weeks ago I was in Canada, meeting people and attending lectures at the Food Regulatory & Quality Assurance Summit in Toronto. The fall colors were in their peak as I landed in Canada’s largest city.

It was the second morning of the summit. We were sitting down, having breakfast with a group of QA managers from local food businesses and discussing recent events in the world of food safety.

My daily job is in marketing, but I’m always trying to draw parallels between one area of life and another. As I was munching away on my second croissant it struck me that both marketing professionals, like me, and quality managers in food companies need technological solutions to support their daily work. It was in that moment that I realized:

Without good quality data, I would be completely blind when it comes to making decisions

You can play a little exercise in your mind and imagine that you have no easily accessible data about non-conformances, the number of failed calibrations, the history of a certain employee, the general risk level of your food supply chain, or whatever – and then try to figure out how you could make educated decisions about the future. You would be completely blind, working away based on guesswork.

Good data and strong analytical tools are the best friends of both the quality managers and marketing professionals, because they allow us to piece together the previously fragmented nuggets of information and understand the big picture. Safefood 360º does exactly that to your food safety management system, because all your food safety data is now in one, perfectly organized, always accessible place.

Technology frees our time from the not so critical, yet compulsory tasks; it brings the focus back to solving everyday issues and improving the systems we manage. It gives us the power to look into the future and plan ahead.

This is nothing new or surprising, but you do have to discover it for yourself. I came back to Dublin on Friday and gave my computer screen a big hug. It is making my life so much better and my job a whole lot easier.