HACCP Records Administration
You have a Food Safety Plan in place. All you need to do is to fill a few records and keep them – Simple? definitely not!
The requirement to print forms on a daily or weekly basis, distributed, collected, checked and filed chronologically and retained for a period of time. They are required by law and always requested by the Environmental Health Officer (EHO or Food Safety Official). They are also required for any food Safety Accreditation audit or award and they also promote Best Practice. Achieving this is a time consuming process and if you have not done so already it may be worth while evaluating the time taken by you are a staff member, time that may be better spend on revenue generating parts of your business.
HACCP Records System
Many food business operate on poorly designed forms printed onto white paper, not easily identifiable and difficult to check that all is complete. Getting a HACCP Records System will transform your single page records to User Friendly forms, designed to suit the way you work. The layout will simplify and reduce the time taken to make an entry and also allow ‘At-A-Glance’ review that the records are being filled in. Pre Dating (only Business Days are included) eliminates the possibility of missing any day and column prompts help staff to know what is to be written in. Binding into books using a calendar style bind retains the records in chronological order and reduces filing time to the time it take to put a book away. As a book the document can be more than mere forms, detailed information such as Requirements and Corrective Actions or any other information that you wish to include so that the staff always have at hand the information they need. Training Pages also form part of the book and you can enter a sample record at the top of the training page as an example of how to correctly fill this in. A Staff Sample Signature Page is included in every book, this may be useful later when a staff member fails to meet the required standards and you have confirmation of the signature, this also includes a confirmation that they have read the additional information provided in the book which they should be strongly encouraged to do.
Benefits
Records – Computer Based or Paper Based?
In the modern age you might think that keeping track on a computer would be the best way. Not necessarily so. Even at today’s prices an investment in technology can be expensive. Terminals or hand held devices are required in several areas. The main point of the record to check that the staff are adhering to the HACCP Plan, if there is a non conformance issue then you need to be able to identify where the non conformance may have occurred and which staff member may be responsible, this means you need a signature, while this is easily achievable on the computer, the staff member must be able to securely log on, then select the item / task, enter the relevant data and then confirm. This could take upwards of 40 seconds for a single entry and the technology must be working and available. Now you need to check that all is complete, you must log into the system and then locate the report(s). Compare that to picking up a sheet of paper and quickly writing in the data into the columns and writing your signature and to check is just a quick look at the page. The cost might also be of interest and as of 2014 you could get 5 years or more of paper for 1 year of IT.
Customer Reviews