As far as food and pharma industries are concerned, there is a lot of pressure from FDA, Government and PCBs, forcing the companies to adopt the latest solutions which are beneficial in the long run,” says Anil Patil, Vice President -Supply Chain, Vadilal Industries Ltd.
Both food processing and pharma fields are equally sensitive to the quality of cleanliness and hygiene standards. Both need to pass through the various compliances such as FDA. Hence, from housekeeping point of view I will say, both are similar and essentially need the required attention to keep the manufacturing license/permit continue.
Speaking of Vadilal Industries, our manufacturing plant at Pundhara Plant is certified with IS0 9001:2008 and HACCP supported by Food Safety Management System (ISO 22000-2005) as well as British Retailing Consortium (UK). Certified by Bureau-Veritas Certification International-Denmark, it has recently received certification for exports from the Export Inspection Council of India, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India which itself is a benchmark for hygiene and quality.
While Bareilly plant is having ISO 9001:2000 & HACCP certification as per IS/ISO 9001:2000 & ISO 15000: 1998 respectively from Bureau of Indian Standards which is the largest Certification authority in India, the Processed Food Division located at Dharampur has got ISO:22000-2005 and BRC (British Retailing Consortium -UK) certification, supporting Food Safety & Food Quality Management System, certified by Indocert and Intertek respectively.
Cleaning as Habit
India is a growing country. The need for keeping things clean is growing as well. We are still in the process of running various programmes and training sessions to make aware of the importance of cleaning. With mass campaign going on I am very positive about people accepting it. From Industrial point of view, meeting various compliances were not taken very seriously but now things have changed. There is an effort to raise the bar too. The industries are concerned about meeting FDA compliances. They spend part of their budget on it, understanding the fact that better the hygiene standard at shopfloor, better will be the product quality. Even small precautions practiced at shopfloor raises the product quality exponentially. This also inhibits the chances of cross contamination which otherwise can bring the brand in a badlight and can result in big losses.
Procurement practices at Vadilal
For the best practices in procurement, as we do, procurement people must take the cleaning & hygiene products as part of raw material. They need to keep certain budget for inventory consumables too for the smooth maintenance works. Vadilal has three major manufacturing facilities at Pundra (Near Gandhinagar), Bareli and Dharampur (Dist.Valsad). I take care of the Dharampur plant, entire procurement and supply chain. We have been following very healthy and good practices in terms of cleanliness & hygiene. Routine measurements have specially been put as part of our SOPs.
Challenges…
Big challenges are the big investments with poor returns, cost control and keeping manpower attrition ratio under the limit. Services offered by manufacturers are very poor, they takes more often week or more than a week time to make these machines work. This leaves only option “Buy 2-3 back up or stand up machines” which is unnecessary from procurement point of view if good servicing could be offered within a short time..
Expectations from Clean India Show…
It is for the first time that I will be attending the Clean India Show. I am looking for the latest mechanised and automated solutions that could help us reducing dependency on manpower. Having said that we will be looking for quality solutions at a reasonably fair price.
