Well that's another day negotiated of avoiding the auditors at work who seemingly do there checking on the morning. Now I appreciate why the company are going after accreditation to attract more customers and as the ultimate customer may be a large supermarket we need to conform to their standards. However, these are several pages of what basically amounts to keep your record in order and the factory clean and take little account of the various businesses it may cover. So as we are technically a food factory we need to adhere to certain stringent rules which are conveniently ignored when they contravene structural factors around the fact that we are an almost 150 year old brewery. So while we must regularly clean floors and pipework and tick the box to say that it was done along with another signature from a supervisor who has inspected it this does not stop the roof leaking and making a mess of the nice clean floor. This is apparently not a serious issue as the product is held within stainless steel vessels and not in contact with the newly dirty areas so begging the question why we wasted the time to clean the floor in the first place. Somebody on the radio the other day was complaining along similar lines and highlighted the point of check boxes: they might indicate that someone has said they have cleaned something but it does not mean that it was cleaned.
   I don't mind cleaning but this routine becomes self fulfilling as the customer demands standards so someone then needs to organise and inspect these standards and the small businesses fall over themselves to maintain them believing it provides them with an edge. This comes hot on the heels of the previous initiative whereby all the workforce had to do an NVQ in Lean Manufacturing which did have some good general points to make but again was not tailor made to any particular business. The constant comparisons with Nissan and how lean and efficient they were obviously is of no consequence to a brewery and did them no favours when they reduced hours at their plant. Aside from the horrific profit based business model looking to shave pennies at every available opportunity the idea that if you operate the manufacturing process exactly the same you get the same product out and thus consistency may work in a car plant but not when you are dealing with variable ingredients such as malt and hops as well as a living organism in yeast that does not always behave the same. The lack of craft to this vision of the process depressed me and may be fine for the generic lagers we produce but I like to think if you create a beer good enough people will drink it as opposed trying to make it as cheap as you can as this leaves you open to someone coming along and undercutting you.
   Efficiency measures were always trying to save a minute here or there which is fine if you run a 24 hour operation but means nothing if you save say 5 minutes on the keg plant as they would not start on a new tank and the lads would go home 5 minutes early or spend it in the canteen. Again the principles are fine and I personally always try to be as efficient and hygienic as I can but that is down to my own self worth at doing a good job but in the end it became a cleaning exercise where we were put into groups and charged with sorting an area out. Some flannel would be used to say how the newly cleaned area was no longer a hazard with all the rubbish cleared away thereby improving the overall site safety after all that had been done was to chuck some unused equipment away and stick some signs up.
   Two points that emerged from this was that it was more efficient to keep equipment you used regularly at hand and that whilst visual management (signs) was important, not to get carried away as too much information with notices everywhere tends to get ignored as nobody is going to stop and read them all. From that, as you may already have guessed, everything has been cleared away to keep areas looking clean and there are notices all over the place. Now I know that they have to cater for the lowest common denominator but some of the signs really are quite patronising.

Really a 6 step guide to washing your hands. We may be a food factory but I've not seen these sort of precautions in a hospital trying to prevent MRSA. My favourite part of this notice though is underneath the 6 step guide it actually states "For further information please call..." in case you were wondering if there were a few missing steps they could advise you about to ensure your hands were really extra clean. No doubt such cleaning stations are situated in areas where your hands are likely to get particularly dirty but in reality they are in the toilets.