Safety is no accident

By guest blogger Wayne Redford, Senior Project Management Consultant to the Food Industry

There have been some attention-grabbing headlines recently with food manufacturers facing significant fines for safety breaches.  Clearly this is not something any manufacturer wants to happen in their facility. So how do you build safety into the very fabric of a food manufacturing plant right at the design stage?

A standard risk management process uses a hierarchy of controls to reduce or mitigate the risk of an incident occurring (Figure 1).

The three best ways of reducing risk (Elimination, Substitution and Engineering Controls) are best considered at the point of designing a production facility, when process automation and control systems can be implemented with relative ease.

In an ideal world, the factory would be built around the process rather than the other way around. A detailed understanding of the process will highlight where segregation of people and machinery is needed, where the high care and low care interfaces are, and where there are opportunities to streamline and improve the production process.

In the same way that HACCP identifies risks to food safety, identifying the critical points where risks to human safety exist can enable the risk to be engineered out through automation or process controls.

Attention should be paid to carefully planning the movement of raw materials in and through the facility as well as the storage and despatch routes of finished product. Clear segregation of these areas can reduce the potential for issues with both personnel and product safety.

The potential future needs of the facility should also be considered, such as making production areas large enough to eventually replace manual lines with automated machinery. Even if it’s currently blue-sky thinking, it is easier to plan ahead for all eventualities than to try and shoehorn new equipment into a smaller area.

In a more common scenario where a new production line needs to be retrofitted to an existing building, it is good practice to lay out the process on a sheet and then overlay the existing facility on to it to see what can and cannot be done or what needs to be moved around. It is vital to bring together a team of people with in-depth experience of your specific product at this point as this is where errors are commonly made.

As outlined here, sometimes compromising on an old factory refit rather than new-build can be counterproductive.  It is highly likely that the concrete slab in a standard shed will need to be dug up to allow for detailed drain work and segregation before any walls can be installed.

Automation and robotics can improve safety by engineering out non added value tasks, and technology improves all the time with innovative new solutions being developed daily. However, a note of caution on automating too far as it can result in long and difficult changeover periods between products. Aim to automate the parts that are common to all products in the range to allow for flexibility of changeovers – a detailed cost/benefit analysis or feasibility study can illustrate this.

The key to success is ensuring that the design team and project team all have deep experience in the relevant disciplines, specifically within food manufacturing. In the long run, it will save money, improve efficiency and make sure that everyone goes home safely.