Age-Old or New, Adages Provide Powerful Messages

My mentors and peers are leaving the quality assurance and food safety world, with most heading into retirement and some beyond. As I am now contemplating retirement myself, I’ve been looking back over my 40 years in the food industry. In that time, I have used a number of sayings, some given by mentors and peers and some I’ve developed myself. One of those that has served me well is: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Following are a few other Practical QA Solution sayings that may help you prevent problems in your career.
 

“Provide a place for everything; keep everything in its place.” Determining what your “everything” is and providing a specific place for each thing leads to space saving, location optimization, and overall organization. Examine your procedures and work processes when designing or organizing your workplace. Building adequate inventory and storage is part of providing a place for everything. Establish a clean counter, table, or desktop; label cabinets, drawers, storage racks, and parts organizers to help keep things in their place. Efficiency is a big benefit which leads to time saving (e.g., you don’t spend time looking for things or figuring out how to immediately replace something you inadvertently ran out of). Of particular benefit from this approach are environments with multiple personnel and work shifts, such as laboratories, sanitation rooms, pesticide/hazardous chemical rooms, cleaning storage areas, and parts storage. Dedicate specific areas for “things.”
 

“Pest presence is a symptom that something is not right with _______.” This saying is a way to convey a very important pest management message: Fix the problem not the symptom. Most pest problems are a result of exclusion and/or sanitation failures. To provide a long-term solution, you need to eliminate the problem. Start with: “How did the pest(s) get in? How did this grow into such a big problem?” Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an effective approach which integrates many tactics into a logical program to provide long-term solutions to pest problems. If you do just two things (keep pests out and keep the facility/property clean), pests will not grow into a big problem. Education, inspection, monitoring, and physical (e.g., lights, temperature, humidity) and mechanical (e.g., sifting, entoletion) controls with the judicious use of pesticides, along with documentation and assurance, are all components of a total IPM program.
 

“Good is not cheap; cheap is not good; and free might be worse.” A good time to use this saying is in the selection of a third-party service provider, such as a pest management and cleaning company. With service providers of this magnitude, you should establish a long-term relationship. Free (“value-added”) service should raise a red flag—nothing is really free. All services to a food facility come with a cost of time, travel, equipment, and supplies as well as expertise, credentials, and certifications. Selecting a low-cost pest or cleaning provider typically leads to more costs and/or a problem that is difficult to correct. Good is not cheap is reflected in certifications, cooperation, credentials, technical expertise—and glowing customer references.
 

“Develop the list; A-B-C it.” I’ve been known as the “here comes the list guy,” because I’ve long maintained that categorizing observations with solutions in a prioritized A-B-C report addresses a common problem in our industry—that of inadequate staffing that creates unreasonable workloads with a do-more-with-less approach. Limited time is often a problem of preparing for third-party audits. To overcome this, develop and prioritize a list with:

A = must do, harm is probable.

B = should do, harm is possible.

C = do if time allows; harm is not probable or possible.

All the As are top priority, and the Bs should be prioritized by importance. Complete the As, most of the Bs, and some Cs, and you should be successful.
 

“If you think it is right, and you feel it is right, it probably is right.” The counterpoint is just as true: If you think or feel something is not right, it probably is not. Doing what is morally right and what is legal is not always the same. People have core values, such as being honest and forthright with integrity. Companies have core values, such as operating in a regulatory-compliant manner and taking care of shareholders while appeasing customers. Another way of stating the obvious is: If it is the right thing to do and it is legal, then do it. Conflict can arise when the right thing to do may not be “legal” from a legal or company procedural perspective. Just eliminating “evidence” of a problem does not make everything “right” and “legal”; if you do not correct the underlying cause, you have simply stuck your finger in the proverbial dike. One example is the way an employee issue is handled when you know the “moral” thing to do, yet company procedure requires strict discipline (e.g., termination). You can consult Human Resources or superiors to see if a more progressive (less strict) discipline could be used to do the right thing for all involved.

Some sayings are powerful short messages. I hope you have found those I’ve listed to be practical QA solutions for some of your problems. My favorite is “Quality is meeting requirements and exceeding customer expectations.” It is, indeed, a powerful short message.