Five Solutions to Support Your Success as a Technical Manager

As Technical Manager, it is your responsibility to ensure the decisions you make are worth the time, money, and effort they take to enforce. You also need to take care that you are supporting your operatives at every turn – making their daily tasks easier with user-friendly equipment, as opposed to inundating them with new and confusing approaches that don’t really have an impact.

Here are two effective strategies for establishing yourself as an informed and open-minded Technical Manager.  

1. Before making any major decisions relating to your technical strategy, you should conduct a walkaround of your site. You should also consider running an internal audit. This will allow you to identify any areas where time, money, and labour could be saved with the introduction of new equipment. During his workshop at the recent Food Safety Innovation Conference, Phil May, Group Hygiene Manager for Greencore, spoke of his admiration for members of senior management who take the time to work a shift on the factory floor and properly engage with their operatives. This could be another fantastic way for you to ensure your decisions are coming from an informed place and are the product of collaborative thinking.

2. The next step is to make sure the data informing your technical strategy is accurate and up-to-date. Otherwise, you could end up prioritising one issue when a much greater problem is going overlooked. You could even find yourself introducing an expensive piece of equipment to your site that isn’t fit for purpose. One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is to invest in top quality thermometers and probes. Not only will they improve the quality and consistency of your operation, but they will also help you to drive accuracy. Instead of your operatives relying on guesswork or having the option of blaming equipment for subpar results, they will be able to closely monitor every aspect of your operation. 

Of the many responsibilities shouldered by a Technical Manager, the regular testing of equipment is one of the most important. Not only is this an essential part of ensuring audit compliance, it is also the best way to protect both your customers and your brand. A failure to take this process seriously could result in a misinformed workforce that is unable to carry out accurate testing within your site. If you are going to prevent this from happening, you will need to prioritise the regular calibration of your equipment. The following four steps will help you with this task: 

The cultivation of an informed and enthusiastic workforce plays an important part in securing success as a Technical Manager. Making this a priority will help you to oversee the smooth roll out of new equipment. It will also empower your workers to extend the lifespan of this equipment – enabling them to adopt the correct approach to operations, cleaning, and validation.

Below are four ways for you to excel in this aspect of your role:   

1. The value of ongoing training can’t be overstated. In addition to sharing relevant resources with new employees, you should also be running regular refreshers for your operatives. Just remember to factor agency staff into your plans, as they won’t have any experience of working at your site and may only be with you for a short period of time. As a result, any training should be easy-to-understand and any new equipment should be purchased with the user experience in mind.

2. Visual Management will help you to connect with operatives of all skill levels, along with workers that don’t have English as their first language. You should accompany the roll out of equipment with highly visual signage, boards, and instruction cards. Your supplier might also have webinars and training videos for you to share.

3. The lifespan of equipment can be significantly extended with the correct maintenance. Colour-coded utensils and Shadow Boards will help to make this happen – encouraging hygiene teams to adopt the right process for each task. You should also check with your site’s Hygiene Manager that any Cleaning Instruction Cards are up to date and feature lots of helpful photos.

4. Finally, you should consider introducing a Digital Quality Management System to your site. This will allow you to closely monitor the activity of your workforce, tracking trends and receiving automatic alarms from any location. Instead of relying on in-person updates from your operatives, a wireless management system will automatically tell you if routine checks, internal audits, validations, and HACCP checks have gone to plan. 

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of your role is the management of the technical budget. This involves a careful balancing act between ever-shrinking funds and the pressure to drive standards. Luckily, the solution doesn’t require you to let things slip on either side. Instead, you can cut costs in the long run by investing in quality equipment that will lower your site’s expenses whilst improving its results. 

Here are three examples of equipment with the power to do this:  

1. Well on its way to replacing the less reliable ATP meter, the A3 system uses unique, patented technology to detect adenosine molecules in all three forms: ATP, ADP and AMP. Although it doesn’t test for allergens, it does detect the presence or absence of organic residue. Because of this, unlike a traditional ATP meter, you can use an A3 system to dramatically reduce the cost of your allergen testing. This was just one of the benefits identified by McCain Foods in our recent Case Study.

2. If your factory works with fryers, the introduction of food oil monitors will eliminate the cost of wasted labour and will prevent good oil from being thrown away. Instead of relying on guesswork, your operatives can carefully monitor the lifespan of the oil they are using and save your site a huge amount of money in the long run. We recently carried out a Case Study with Mitchells & Butlers to explore the impact our food oil monitors had on their business. When we spoke to Phil Sharp, Manager of Kitchen Operations, he revealed that “the initial investment in introducing oil monitors had already paid for itself”. 

3. Already used and loved by Greggs, Morrisons, Bakkavor, and Greencore, Segregation Solutions will help you to reduce downtime and grow the production window. SegriCovers will protect your machinery and other factory items during washdowns, the modular system of the SegriScreen X-TEND will allow you to add or remove screens depending on your needs, and the moisture-repellent PVC SegriCurtains will fit any and every space.