New Report Features – the truth about reporting
Let’s be honest for a moment! If you are a food safety manager, technologist or consultant responsible for maintaining a food safety system you will be familiar with the scenario whereby in the days leading up to your certification audit you engage in the almost masochistic exercise of catching up on months of reports and trending data to ensure the requirements of the auditor are met. I know this because I worked in this role for many years…
It’s not that we are doing anything wrong. It’s just the nature of the job and the pressures of staying on top of increasing demands. In fact, you would have to search far and wide to find a food safety manager who does not want to have at hand up-to-date quality reports and trend data. Why? Because in the long term it makes our job easier. When a management system yields improvements (large or small) then the food safety manager feels they have done their job and made a valuable and valued contribution.
So what is the problem? Well it is simple and universally known throughout the world of food safety. 95% of all food businesses operate a manual paper based system. While they get the job done they do not by their nature produce any meaningful data to drive improvement. They simply record compliance. In order to extract the enormous potential value of the data a significant effort is required which is usually gobbled up by the day to day job.
So when it came to developing our reports feature for Safefood 360 we gave ourselves a number of objectives. Reports needed to be:
- Generated automatically and in real time based on each new record entered into the system.
- Pertinent to the food safety manager and the main food safety certification standards.
- Easily accessible and ideally with just one click.
- Capable of being emailed, printed and exported to a variety of other file formats including Word, Excel and PDF.
To achieve the above we spoke to our existing users and referred to the technical standards. The result – over 250 one-click reports covering everything from reports by number, registers, parato analysis, pest control trending, micro trending and many, many more. The following video gives a brief overview of the scope and feel of reports available.
Let’s be honest for a moment! If you are a food safety manager, technologist or consultant responsible for maintaining a food safety system you will be familiar with the scenario whereby in the days leading up to your certification audit you engage in the almost masochistic exercise of catching up on months of reports and trending data to ensure the requirements of the auditor are met. I know this because I worked in this role for many years…
It’s not that we are doing anything wrong. It’s just the nature of the job and the pressures of staying on top of increasing demands. In fact, you would have to search far and wide to find a food safety manager who does not want to have at hand up-to-date quality reports and trend data. Why? Because in the long term it makes our job easier. When a management system yields improvements (large or small) then the food safety manager feels they have done their job and made a valuable and valued contribution.
So what is the problem? Well it is simple and universally known throughout the world of food safety. 95% of all food businesses operate a manual paper based system. While they get the job done they do not by their nature produce any meaningful data to drive improvement. They simply record compliance. In order to extract the enormous potential value of the data a significant effort is required which is usually gobbled up by the day to day job.
So when it came to developing our reports feature for Safefood 360 we gave ourselves a number of objectives. Reports needed to be:
- Generated automatically and in real time based on each new record entered into the system.
- Pertinent to the food safety manager and the main food safety certification standards.
- Easily accessible and ideally with just one click.
- Capable of being emailed, printed and exported to a variety of other file formats including Word, Excel and PDF.
To achieve the above we spoke to our existing users and referred to the technical standards. The result – over 250 one-click reports covering everything from reports by number, registers, parato analysis, pest control trending, micro trending and many, many more. The following video gives a brief overview of the scope and feel of reports available.
Things have changed at radical pace since I was a food technologist generating all these reports manually. I remember when spread sheets first appeared. They went from being a mild curiosity to being an essential tool. At the very least they cut down on the number of errors and generated decent looking graphs. We are now in the age of the Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS). This is where technology changes the game. Our new reports section is not just a useful feature but is in fact a living and breathing entity. Because the solution is web based we can update and add (within hours) new and better reports. And we will. Coming soon will be our Executive Summary reports which will be present in each module. This will allow our users to generate management reports for review meetings within seconds.
Now back to the subject of honesty. Software is a tremendous tool for the management of standardized systems like those found in food safety. It will not cure all ills since records still need to be entered. However when these tools allow you to extract management information with literally one click of a button (on the day of the audit if necessary) then we are adding value through our work and better still, avoiding the last minute, pre-audit frenzy.
Happy reporting… 
