Statistical Process Control for the Food Industry

6Team Formation, Team Dynamics and Training

6.1 The Team

SPC (Statistical Process Control) is a statistical and systematic technique for quality control and process improvement, requiring a group of people to deploy the technique in an organisation. One of the common challenges of implementation is that in this industry, only one person is responsible for it, which leads to the fact that SPC deployment works more efficiently with teamwork commitment. No matter how good engineers and statisticians or software programs are, it is impossible to improve quality without the participation of a functional company workforce – SPC relies heavily on the effectiveness and functional of a team.

Most of the food organisations have developed their teams to oversee quality‐related issues even prior to the introduction of SPC deployment. For example, during the efforts of a company preparing itself for hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) certification, according to the manual, a HACCP team must be developed to spearhead the certification process in a company. Commonly, the team has to change the operational and functional aspects following the SPC's mechanism and its underlying philosophy (Dogdu, Santos, and Dougherty 1997). The good news is that the mechanism of implementing SPC and HACCP has similarities, which means that team members can be allocated for both implementations.

The purpose of this study is to address the research gap in SPC implementation literature by answering ...