Today, food and beverage manufacturers face pressure from all sides. They need to drive revenue by meeting rigorous productivity and quality assurance goals, all while complying with evolving regulatory standards concerning food safety and sustainability. On top of these competing demands, they need to manage the wide-ranging impacts related to the persistent shortages of skilled labor.
These pressures place food and beverage leaders in an immensely difficult position: figuring out how to do more with less. Fortunately, modern digital tools help boost food safety and mitigate labor-related issues. With the right digital tools, food and beverage leaders can streamline production timelines, boost productivity, improve product quality and food safety, and protect against the loss of crucial institutional knowledge.
A closer look at how labor shortages undermine food and beverage operations
Labor-related issues span from the factory floor to the boardroom, making it sometimes difficult to grasp the impact on everyday operations. Here are a few areas regularly impacted:
- Slower schedules and lower productivity. When hygiene responsibilities run up against the limitations of understaffing, CIP cycles can take longer and lose consistency, requiring repeat cleanings. Moreover, leaders on the factory floor can become so busy keeping production lines moving that they lose visibility into equipment or process inefficiencies (leaking valves, over-rinsing, etc.) that further slow the production process. What starts as small inefficiencies become big ones over time, and food safety issues often find their way into these under-resourced and behind-schedule operations.
- Loss of institutional knowledge. In times of high employee turnover, food and beverage operations run the risk of losing core sets of knowledge that keep their cleaning and sanitation program running. Many CIP processes rely on this institutional knowledge––for example, how to run cleaning and sanitation cycles, how to manage the temperature of process water, which pieces of equipment need special attention, etc. When the knowledge walks out the door, both food safety and operational efficiency suffer.
- Short-term focus over longer-term stratgy. Hiring and onboarding new employees from a dwindling pool of applicants takes time and effort. When plant managers are saddled with managing a revolving door of new employees, they lose capacity for more strategic objectives. Streamlining operations, devising more sustainable processes, lengthening the lifespan of core equipment through proper care––all of these important tasks can fall by the wayside when labor concerns get in the way.
Faced with a problem this pervasive, it’s tempting to accept it as a fact of doing business in 2024. Modern digital tools can mitigate the effects of labor shortages and help food and beverage leaders achieve their goals across multiple performance metrics.
How the right digital monitoring and reporting tools can help you manage labor shortage challenges
Digital solutions like Ecolab’s 3D TRASAR™ for CIP and Supervisor™ for Food Safety and Quality platforms supply real-tim insights that can help food processors address process issues created by high turnover and labor shortages.
Keeping schedules on track—and identifying emerging issues
In addition to these real-time insights, purpose-built solutions can also help plant leaders track and display facility trends, helping you to identify emerging food safety issues quickly. With greater visibility, plant managers can isolate problem areas and take action right away.
Standardizing and documenting plant knowledge
What’s more, digital monitoring solutions support the retention of institutional knowledge through a host of procedural functions that centralize core process instructions and provide your team with step-by-step instructions. These features also improve oversight by giving management improved visibility into when and how C&S functions are being completed.
Saving time and energy—while increasing assurances
And because they provide concrete documentation surrounding C&S operations, these tools also simplify and improve audit readiness by allowing teams to create reports in a fraction of the time. This functionality is priceless for companies looking to add a layer of confidence to their compliance processes.
Ultimately, these digital tools transform cleaning and sanitation operations by enabling plant leadership to take a proactive approach. When plant managers are equipped with real-time insight into their operations, they can sharpen their focus on driving efficiency and productivity––while protecting food safety and quality.
