Critical to Quality Preventive Maintenance Plan: moving from Firefighting to Prevention

Prevention of Quality and Food Safety issues and elimination of repetitive ones has been in focus of Food Industry for many years.

Leading categories of root causes for issues and market incidents, excluding those related to human mistake, capabilities and organizational culture, include equipment performance, cleaning and sanitizing processes gaps and failure of operational controls of critical equipment.

Experience and learnings from quality and food safety issues of more than 10 years, recorded across 56 manufacturing sites were used to build a preventive maintenance matrix aiming to address risk and reoccurrence of incidents with root causes listed under the above categories.

The matrix is reviewed and updated on annual basis to capture new learnings and risks identified.

By mandating implementation of the Critical to Quality Preventive Maintenance matrix, a total reduction of >80% was recorded across the manufacturing plants over 3 years period.

Kalliopi Chalkou, Group Food Safety and Suppliers Quality Manager, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company