HOW TO STRENGTHEN THE MANAGEMENT OF FOOD PRODUCT NON-COMPLIANCE?

Foreign bodies, not easy to see!

There was a big commotion this morning at Soprodal during the daily briefing.
Jean Villerest, the Sales Manager, has just been given a hard time by a furious customer: "A consumer found a hard, sharp piece of plastic in one of our products! Fortunately, the mother noticed it before serving her children. Can you imagine what could have happened?
Everyone takes the blame: production, purchasing, quality.

Samia Neaux, Quality Manager, calms things down and takes charge. No doubt about it, a critical non-conformity must be opened. Estimate the impact but also analyse the problem. Include all the potential players, without forgetting to inform.

Dealing with non-conformities: a real investigation...

Having customer contact. Reach the consumer. Call the consumer to apologise for the company's actions, but also try to recover the foreign body. Identify the batch concerned. Block it. Notify the DDPP. Initiate a recall. Recover the foreign body. Take a picture of it and distribute it to the relevant actors. Have it analysed in a specialised lab. Trace back the raw material batches. Contact suppliers. Check the controls before starting the lines. Consult the maintenance operations on this line...

On receipt of the body of the crime, everyone makes their own hypothesis, the most likely being ... the supplier.

But it is the analysis that puts the team on the right track. The lab result is categorical: the plastic comes from a protective cover of a ceiling light.
A thorough check of all the ceiling lights in the production line area revealed the origin. The chip is unique and matches the foreign body found.

Non-conformity management: a valuable indicator for product quality improvement.

The non-conformity is far from over.
Why an intervention during production? And why wasn't it recorded? Why were the pre-start-up "hard body" checks not useful? What about the investment in new lighting that has been requested in the last three budgets? Wouldn't X-rays and optical sorting have detected the foreign body?

But also, how to be better prepared for this type of exercise, unfortunately difficult to avoid. Samia counted her e-mails on this subject. She had to make photocopies and scans of paper documents, send photos, and print out the analysis report. How to put it all together?

And, damn! She forgot to warn Marc Chandon in Purchasing to drop the supplier track...

How do you collect all the data related to non-conformities?

How can non-conformities be positively exploited?