Statistical Process Control for the Food Industry

9Roadmap for the Deployment of SPC

9.1 A Cookbook Approach

The mechanism of Statistical Process Control (SPC) is simple but effective and powerful for quality control. Thus, it will support quality improvement effort to a great extent if it is applied well. The critical quality parameters of the food products are assessed after comparing the measurements or attributes of the quality factor with the desired target value. The corrective actions need to readjust, decrease, or eliminate the differences if deviations of the value are higher than the acceptable control limit. For instance, food manufacturing factories tend to be hectic. Hence, potential improvements are often ignored or overlooked as there is no responsible person to identify and improve the process. Therefore, the mechanism in SPC allows food businesses to observe analytically what are the processes involved and identify the quality of the process.

Nevertheless, SPC implementation involves data collection and chart filing. Besides this, it also requires a systematic strategy for its implementation. A considerable amount of time and effort will be wasted by seeking cooperation from the employees or redoing tasks if they were conducted incorrectly. The SPC implementation roadmap contains five phases towards successful sustainability of SPC implementation (Lim et al. 2015). Nevertheless, users should be flexible in order to adopt the activities, tools, and methods according to the capacity and capability of the company. ...