There are very few people who would try to defend a lack of teamwork in the business world. As the FDA FSMA begins to impact the food supply chain, building a successful and powerful team approach can greatly simplify meeting new requirements and provide significant defense against unwanted FDA visits and audits. Combining food safety and quality thinking into the most powerful preventive approach is on the horizon.
Learning how to develop and implement functional, cross-functional, production, supervisorial and specialized teams requires new thinking and organizational change that can head off many of the interdepartmental food safety and quality issues managers and production meetings are not aware of.
Quality and process improvement teams can learn to prioritize and attack problems in all business functions at the corporate and facility levels. Effective team building that focuses on quality (and other) problems has been shown to smooth all operational functions.
Many operational problems are solvable but are ineffectively resolved due to departmental barriers. Company functional and cross-functional management improvement teams can be empowered to eliminate barriers between them. Teams require training designed to help them over the lack of trust and cooperation often found in simple and complex organizations.
Learning to build effective teams is not complex, does not cost your company a ton of money and begins with team-oriented policy and operational changes.
Dr. John Ryan is a certified Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PQCI) specializing in food safety process control and food safety plan validation. He holds a Ph.D. in research and statistical methods and has extensive international manufacturing quality and operations experience in large and small manufacturing operations and he is a retired Hawaii State Department of Agriculture Quality Assurance Division administrator.He currently operates two business divisions focused on food safety system validation (http://www.RyanSystems.com) and transportation controls (http://www.SanitaryColdChain.com).He has previously published books other covering food fraud, teams and teamwork and has recently completed a new book on validating preventive controls in food operations.
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