Lubrication training: food safety best practice

Lack of competence as a result of insufficient training was recently highlighted as a common non-conformity with regard to the current BRC Global Standard.

It’s an issue the Activate team come across way more often than we would like to and a big part of the root cause is lubricants being viewed as ‘product’ rather than lubrication expertise being seen as a ‘service’ integral to a site’s reliability culture.

The resulting lack of competence is a recipe for disaster, not only from a food safety point of view, but also with regard to the wider risk landscape: downtime costs, potential for product recall and brand damage, and negatively impacted OEE.

The baffling thing is that this situation shouldn’t exist, let alone be a commonly identified cause of non-compliance. Choose a knowledgeable lubrication partner and you’ll find that compliance and safety are designed into the entire approach to lubrication systems and culture.

With Activate, customer knowledge empowerment begins when we first analyse current practices and make recommendations for improvement. Everyone involved in a site’s lubrication culture receives face-to-face training at the point of system install and comprehensive documentation is supplied to give instant reference for best practice.

We have also developed our own e-training platform, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to give the necessary flexibility to on-board new team members and keep existing ones up to speed on a continual basis.

Activate Insights: tailor-made for Activate customers

Activate Lubricants' decades of experience in a focussed market mean we have a wealth of specialised knowledge to pass on to help our customers adhere to best practice in what are very compliance-heavy industries.

This is where our own e-training offering, Activate Insights, comes in: an online portal covering all major aspects of our products, service and best practice for foodgrade lubricant use.

The key feature is that Activate Insights is exclusive to Activate customers, and individual training portals are customer specific. The videos and evaluation sets that appear in your account are specifically edited to cover your individual oil store inventory and factory-floor requirements. So, no sitting through generic information that isn't relevant to you or your engineers!

Even if we've run a 'Toolbox Talk' in person at your production site (e.g., on installation of our System8® storage unit), we recommend that engineers take the Knowledge Evaluation at least once a year to keep best practice front-of-mind. New, relevant content is added to your Insights portal as and when available so chances are you will see something fresh when you return.

On completion, a certificate is sent to your Compliance Manager for inclusion in your site's Compliance Folder - another tick in the box for when the auditors visit!

The training videos themselves are always available to simply watch if you need to refresh your memory on a specific product or application.

Activate Insights subscriptions start from just £69 per year, per user so our e-training platform also provides a substantial cost saving when compared to face-to-face site visits. It really is a win-win solution for your engineers!

Please contact us to subscribe to Activate Insights >