[From the Board] QA Leadership: Becoming a Quality Expert

Editor’s note: In the next issue of QA magazine, Love will provide information on putting application into operation, and implementing your programs within your company.

Food protection is all of our responsibility. Accepting ownership, promoting food safety and defense and sharing expertise is our challenge.

Although recent public health threats — caused by factors within the food supply chain — have led to a loss of consumer confidence, many great strides have been made to further food safety and defense in the United States. Regulators are working aggressively to restore faith and to ensure domestic and imported food is protected from pathogenic contamination.

But we cannot expect any one agency or company to take the full responsibility. Instead, we must realize that none of us is alone in this industry, and respond by reaching out to fortify our company’s, our customers’ and our industry’s much-needed defense system. We all must share in each other’s hard work and be willing to distribute what we have learned.

Starting within our own facilities, we, the quality assurance managers and directors, have a responsibility to establish ourselves as food protection experts and the strong arm of our quality assurance team. We must be about putting on the business suit of our collaborated technical expertise, and being the voice of food protection science in our company.

BECOMING THE RELIABLE SOURCE. To do so, first define your department as a reliable source, and dedicate yourself to ensuring you have established a positive QA/QC presence. Then determine the main factors driving your company, and ensure that the vehicle for saving lives and preventing injury or illness has a proper place moving forward.

Quality, food safety and profitability should be partners in the same cause. To make this happen, you and your team need to work both with your company and for your company.

• Define yourself and your department as having integrity; being reliable/dependable; stable/grounded; realistic and open minded (willing to incorporate and temper suggestions); and establish exactly who you are actually protecting.
• Reward those who can be trusted with the smaller tasks and responsibilities by entrusting them with more important tasks.
• Prioritize and make allowances for the unplanned.
• Do not be a “tool fool.” That is, do not let yourself get caught up in handhelds, e-mails, planners, charts and graphs. Control your work through them; don’t let them control you.
• Check yourself periodically to honestly ask: Are you throwing money at every new challenge and situation?
• Work within your company’s means; use what you currently have to its fullest advantage.
• Push the envelope on food safety and defense by tightening what you have already created. Many times the answer is already in our grasp, we just need to do what we said we were doing rather than letting that slip when other issues assume the forefront.
• Re-visit, remind and retrain. Sometimes the golden nuggets of the past are precisely the answer now. At the same time, however, understand that there is a need to be in touch with the rapid development of new information and information sources.

BUILDING RESOURCES. In maneuvering the QA department to become a positive presence, you should continually establish reliable sources and always protect them. To expand your network and develop relationships and experience in people, places and things:

• Know and involve yourself with regulatory branches, offices and officials.
• Become knowledgeable in state, federal and international regulations, mandates, registries, CFRs, manuals, etc.
• Use industry authorities, groups and experts, organizations, universities, government grant programs, industry publications, journals, white papers, customer letters, supplier resources and foreign resources.
• Never underestimate the Internet and its resources.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on the available resources, be sure you understand how to best utilize each of them. Appreciate and respect your resources; anything that is not appreciating is depreciating. Acknowledge their support; return the assistance when they reach out to you.

Now that you are reaching out, the material must be substantiated. Use your network for new resource validation; as you move forward, verify all that new information.

Who in QA can forget the twin siblings “validate and verify”? Is it not said that a carpenter that measures twice, cuts only once? We always must remember that no matter how tempted we are to move ahead, we must prove it or we cannot use it. We must always stand by a pillar of integrity and say that if we do not know the answer then that is our answer. State that you do not know, but you will get back with an answer in a timely manner.

The author is global quality control manager, Phillips Foods, Baltimore, and a member of QA’s Advisory Board.