Why does food need to be managed differently?
Raw materials such as fruit and vegetables differ from item to item, day to day, and crop to crop. If the final produced good is out of spec, it cannot be distilled or disassembled back to its original component parts, as those parts do not retain their original identity like assembled products can. These fundamental chemical differences require a fundamentally different quality approach.

Challenges facing food producers today
The ultimate goal for food producers is to develop a quality system that is rich in customer sensory data, applies exact measurement of raw material qualities, and ensures a production process that is always in control and capable of producing the highest quality of food possible. The customers include a wide range of characters: ultimate consumers or restaurateur who purchases the product, the supermarket that needs to make money selling the product, and the regulatory agencies that are in place to ensure food safety.

Missing anything that is critical to quality (CTQ) could mean not being able to sell the product because the user did not like it, or it harmed a person because of a failure to manage hygiene at the factory. Product design in the food production industry also relies heavily on research and development (R&D) of a particular technology and not always on the consumer. Ideally, R&D should work hand-in-hand with production.

Product design that includes ease of manufacturing results in reduced setup time and costs, faster start-up, and higher quality in the finished product. The elements commonly found in manufacturing systems that consistently produce food products of high quality include standardization of components and equipment, simplified recipes and instructions, minimization of handling, and mistake-proof processes.

Distinguishing quality from safety
A quality product meets all of the important needs of the customer, including taste, price, availability, ease of use and safety. Safety is all about do no harm. A high-quality product will be safe, but a safe product is not always of high quality. Do not mix them up.

Unilever, one of the larger food producers, understands that quality and safety are equally important. Paul Pullman, CEO, knows what quality is all about: “We meet every day needs for nutrition, hygiene, and personal care with brands that help people feel good, look good, and get more out of life.”

Sunny Fresh Foods, Inc. were winners of the Baldrige Quality Award in 1999 and again in 2005. At SFF, a subsidiary of Cargill, Inc., personal and food safety are of primary concern. SFF uses a one-year short-term planning cycle to remain current in an industry subject to rapid changes due to factors such as raw material availability, new skill requirements, regulatory changes, technological advances, and even seasonable variation in egg consumption. Data from these and other areas are compiled into a Business Environment document that serves as the basis for developing annual key strategies, financial plans, operating plans, and monthly scorecards.

Developing skilled safety and quality management staff
Quality needs to happen every day, supervised by trained and certified quality engineers and managers.  When untrained personnel oversee quality, the organization builds an unseen risk into the process—that of not knowing how a product is truly performing over time to the CTQs. The fundamental differences in manufacturing and food processes will continue to pose unique challenges for organizations striving for excellence; the most successful companies will continue to endeavor towards producing the highest quality products.

At FastCompany, Donna Wells, CEO of Mindflash, suggests a solution that does not involve blaming our education system or the work ethic of our labor force: Hire for the qualities you seek and teach the skills they need.

Wells provides an example. Con-way Freight of Salt Lake City couldn’t find and hire qualified drivers fast enough to meet its needs. Rather than being chronically understaffed—and losing revenue as a result—it started free driving schools at 75 of its truck yards and guaranteed a job for anyone who passed the training. In the first 18 months, it graduated nearly 440 drivers and has retained 98% of them.

The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that you can use to evaluate your hiring and training processes:

• What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
• How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
• How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new members of your workforce?

As Wells concludes, “With technology and industries shifting so quickly, our economy’s open positions aren’t necessarily a perfect fit for our unemployed workers. Rather than simply wishing that mismatch away, businesses need to embrace training to reduce it.”

To read more about building a competent and engaged workforce, click on these articles:

• Strategic Human Resources
• Best-in-Class Workforce Planning
• How to Hire for Values
• Evaluating Training Effectiveness
• Why HR Needs Baldrige

Your organization needs processes for:

• Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
• Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
• Managing organizational knowledge
• Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
• Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies

Best practices to consider:

• The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
• In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
• Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.

Common problems areas:

• The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
• Knowledge is lost when employees leave the company.
• No processes exist to identify the organization’s knowledge assets or to collect and use that knowledge.
• The organization does not pursue, value, or share best practices.

To read more about building and managing your knowledge assets, click on these articles:

• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• Outside-the-Box Benchmarking

Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:

1. Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
2. Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
3. Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
4. Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
5. Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
6. Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns of people.” Those insights are valuable to other parts of your organization, too.
7. Build a common language. Be careful to avoid jargon that your team understands but that other parts of the organization—and critical stakeholders—may not.
8. Link innovation to your brand strategy. “Develop a brand-audit tool and use it early in your process. This will guide decision-making and only allow initiatives that meet certain brand criteria to be approved for further development.”

To read more about innovation and communication, click on these articles:

• Managing for Innovation
• Revolutionary Thinking
• When Innovation and Planning Collide
• 10 Healthcare Innovations
• What People Need to Hear
• Be Prepared
• Effective Employee Communication

I’ve written four books on the Baldrige model and worked with five Baldrige Award winners and with Baldrige experts in dozens of organizations. I’ve studied how they think and act and have discovered the secrets that transform them from plodders to strategic performers.

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• How to become a process master
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• How to get more out of your group
• How to use the Deming Question to work smarter
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