Results from our KPI survey – most important food safety KPIs

Last month we reached out to our readers to ask about what they consider some of their most important food safety KPIs and tell us about the different reports they are preparing on a regular basis. 15 active people responded to our blog post and we got a lot of interesting insights from this data. Thank you so much for your valuable opinions and the many good discussions I had with you over the email.

Most important KPIs

We found that practical things like customer complaints, CCP monitoring, and different KPIs relating to nonconformance are the leading KPIs that most of the surveyed people are tracking. Surprisingly few companies used derivative KPIs where you put together two numbers; for example you might divide the number of complaints by production volume. Customer complaints was by far the most common KPI as well as the most commonly referred to report.

Most important reports

When it comes to reporting there were few things that different participants had in common. The topics of reports are similar across companies so that most people need to report on complaints, nonconformance, etc. However the type of reports and the reporting frequencies varied heavily. Some companies use just a list of incidences, some people like seeing a trend graph. Other companies had daily reports, others had monthly reports. I think the bottom line here is that no matter what kind of reporting system we as a software vendor want to develop, it will need to facilitate all these different approaches to reporting and allow maximal flexibility.

How important are KPIs for you?

Unsurprisingly the overwhelming majority of the fifteen participants found KPIs and reporting to be a very important part of their work. The average score was 4.36 out of 5. However, many participants also highlighted that KPIs are just as good and useful as the quality of your data to begin with. If you start with low quality data it makes no difference if you have the most high quality reporting system in the world.

Thanks once more for your feedback and I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion!