Taking the leap towards a higher standard in your food safety management system

The biggest thing keeping people from reaching their full potential in both their private and working life is fear. All food businesses have ambitious visions of growth and dreams of new heights. But too many times the necessary improvements we all know are essential for pushing our businesses to the next level just get delayed to the next year and it’s business as usual.

Doing the right thing and trying to reach a higher standard is never a bad idea. In fact, upping your game will make your life easier in many ways. And I also know that waiting for the perfect time to get started with a difficult project is never going to come. You can wait until the end of the century but doing that tough project is not going to feel any more appealing than it did before.

We all have things in life that we keep on postponing even though we know it would be in our best interest to get it over and done with. Perhaps you are postponing a doctors appointment, perhaps you just never get down to fix that leaky roof. It’s exactly the same thing with your food safety management system.

Every week our team is talking to several food businesses around the world and we always find the same story repeating itself. Most food companies have food safety management systems that are not working anywhere near as well as they could if some investment was made to improve the system and take it to the next level.

But at the same time the drive to make a change is being hampered by the fear of a difficult transition. You are surely aware of the weaknesses of your current system and the manual work that comes from maintaining it. But it’s safe to stick to what you have. So it never quite becomes priority number one to fix the system.

But take a minute to imagine how your life could change if you invested some time and money into improving your system! Did you know that you could automate a significant portion of the work that you are doing manually at the moment? Scheduling, reporting, alerting, archiving, sharing, collating etc. are all tasks that can be done automatically or be completed with a couple of clicks. And better yet, our team can manage the entire transition of converting your content to our software. So your job is to more or less to sit back and enjoy yourself while we prepare the system for you according to your specifications. The transition is way less painful than you would imagine first.

Maintaining a higher standard

Sometimes people fear that if you want to up your game it will come with higher expectations and more difficult requirements. This is not necessarily the case at all. Reaching a higher standard will take some initial work but if you set your systems and controls up in the right way it will require no more effort to maintain that standard and operate in that environment because it becomes second nature to your organisation to operate this way.

Just like the picture below, it takes some initial energy to pump the water uphill but it takes no more energy for the water to stay in this new higher state once it is confined by the walls of the mountain. Our software is just like this. It takes some initial energy to set things up but once you are done, your entire system operates on a higher level with most of the laborious processes being completely automatic and all of the routine tasks you used to do in Word, Excel or a piece of paper being significantly streamlined.

Today is a good day to take a critical look at your food safety management system. Is it operating at the level it should be? If you want to make it better, don’t wait. Just do it!