One of the main reasons why VSS is so important at food production plants is because it helps keep the workforce safe. When health and safety standards are maintained, you will have happy employees, which makes for a better working environment. You’ll also protect the brands and reputation associated with your food production processes. With a strong VSS system in place, you’ll be able to guarantee consistency across all product lines too.
Keeping Food and People Safe
Consultation is important. We ask the client what they want, but it is just as important to ask them what they need. What are they trying to achieve, and how can we tailor our offering or design elements to fit them?
Monitoring the entrance and exit of visitors and staff provides security, keeps intruders out and ensures that only authorised people enter certain areas. VSS also provides a record in case of any criminal activity, so it’s not just about the perimeter.
We use the ‘onion method’ as part of our 5-step design process and VSS needs to cover all elements of the business.
A key part of a food service establishment’s operations is monitoring the flow of people through different areas. This may be done to ensure that certain areas are cleaned when scheduled so that food production can continue in an efficient and safe manner too.
To ensure the safety of employees and their belongings, VSS can be used to monitor sensitive areas such as break rooms; and random search triggers can be activated to ensure that security guards are conducting regular searches.
Smart Factory Monitoring
Food production plants can be monitored for noise levels too. An event such as a loud bang or breaking glass may trigger an alarm, lockdown of an area or shutdown of an entire line.
VSS can be used to monitor the safe use of equipment and ensure that factory machinery and appliances are not misused. Any deviations from standard procedures can be detected and logged for managers to look back at. Any time delays in baking, cooking, or packaging can be tracked by looking at a product’s “use by” date on its label; if it goes beyond that date, an automatic alarm can be set off… these systems can even monitor if the wrong ingredients have been used.
When working in moisture-driven, or heat-driven, environments you also need to make sure that the equipment used will remain stable in these conditions. They also need to have easy access for cleaning and maintenance.
We face many challenges when designing products for use in challenging environments such as food production plants. Our engineers often work in challenging environments, where they may encounter dangerous or harmful chemicals — so these are all things we plan for.
Project planning is essential, as is investing the appropriate amount of time in choosing the right systems for the client’s needs. Communication skills are also crucial to ensure that we can be flexible enough to accommodate our clients’ schedules. Some clients may only have downtime at certain hours for each line so might need their projects completed on separate days — so flexibility from all parties is required. Unplanned downtime can lead to a loss of productivity if it isn’t addressed quickly enough. Food production plants can also suffer from these types of problems due to the nature of their operations.
By planning for and informing our clients of incidents, we can help prevent them from occurring. This offers you more confidence in us and can save you time and money. It also allows you to be more productive by linking incidents to your systems, which improves compliance overall.
