Audit of Safety Management System Element, Research Paper Example

The Coca Cola Company is the world’s leading manufacturer, distributor and marketer of various non-alcoholic beverages syrups and concentrates used by several bottling partners in producing over thirty beverage brands. The corporate headquarters of the company is based in Atlanta and has operational branches in over 200 countries across the world. The company serves the local preferences with several beverages depending on the serving occasions and tastes. The company produces top-quality beverages, and contributes to several communities across the world through the education commitment, diversity, environment, health, and wellness. In addition, the company strives to be a good neighbor and consistently its business decisions with the aim of bolstering life quality in many communities where it conducts business. The Coca Cola safety and Loss prevention manager has the responsibility of standardizing and overseeing the implementation and establishment of the necessary safety and prevention loss, abbreviated as SLP. The SLP programs are implemented by the management throughout the company’s sales region in order to ensure the reduction of both the cost and frequency of the accidents. In addition, the managers have the responsibility of giving support to the company’s risk control team in the process of expansion loss prevention across the various regions of the assigned territories. The Loss control manager has the responsibility of consistent implementation and execution of the current initiatives on the loss prevention across all the functional areas of the company.

The Coca-Cola Company has the aim of benefitting and refreshing everybody who buys it. For the company, quality is more than just what the company sees or measures. The company strives relentlessly to go past the global flexible expectations since keeping of the quality promise in the market is the highest business objective of the Coca Cola Company. As briefly discussed in the previous paragraph, the Coca Cola Company quality management system does the role of establishing, documenting, as well as, maintaining a top quality management system to continually improve the company effectiveness in accordance to the requirements of the company system. With the belief that people take Coca Cola products because they are symbol of quality and customer satisfaction, the company strives to maintain an excellent quality control system which ensures that all its products components are within the acceptable standards as determined by the OSHA.

TCCQS (The Coca Cola Quality System) was established in 1995 with the aim of controlling the quality if the local tastes and maintaining consistent quality when introducing new products into the market. TCCQS management today serves the role of coordinating and guiding various activities in order to ensure top quality in all the products.  With the increased awareness on the need for food safety in the company and throughout the entire chain of supply, the company ensures that TCCQS embraces only the stringent manufacturing and the most up-to-date quality improvement practices. The third evolution of the TCCQS, which is used today, offers several improvements to ensure proper management of the quality system as well as acceleration of the quality system implementation. The improvements include simplified modular and streamlined structure, advantage external resources provision like auditing and training, company alignment with the externally recognized quality standards and integration of the preventive action as a management control. The other improvements include the inclusion of more rigorous demands in the process of planning new service introductions. The other measure is the incorporation of the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) into the QMSS (Quality Management System Standard). Finally, the TCCQS defines the various problem solving methodologies as well as tools used in driving the continuous progresses and improvements (The Coca Cola Hellenic, 2007). The modular framework of the TCCQS has additional environmental and safety facets. Environmental safety is one key role of the Coca Cola Company. The company encourages the practice of recycling to avoid the various cases of environmental pollution. Most of the Coca Cola product packing bottles are recycled and used for repacking. In essence, the company takes it its responsibility to ensure the environmental safety. In many branches across the world, the main process involved is bottling which definitely causes noise pollution. Several bottling industries associated with Coca Cola are charged with the role of bottling, packaging, and availing the products into the industry (Coca Cola Enterprise). The company has a Quality Management system that meets that of the ISO Standard. The system embodies the management system requirements of the GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative). The other role of the system is the conforming of the food safety. In addition to this, the Quality Management System features various Company specific elements to maintain the current global requirements of food safety. The QMSS also features the various Company specific features like crisis resolution and the incident management. For individuals or organizations, which have chosen to pursue the quality accreditation of the company, the assurance section integrates the system requirements of the management governing the laboratory operation clearly embodied and described in the ISO Standard number 17025. Concerning the environmental facet, the management has a system that includes the management system of the environment. The system meets the required ISO Standard 14001 of the 1996, and has various additional elements that are company-specific (The Coca Cola Hellenic, 2007).

The company also has the SLP facet features SMSS, which necessarily meets the OHSAS 18001 of the 1999. The OHSAS is one of the most preferred bodies when it comes to measuring of the organizational safety and quality standards. OHSAS provides a deep comprehension of the various problems that employees suffer while in the company. Besides, it analyzes the various possible issues regarding the quality of the products that organizations produce as well as their possible effects on the lives of the consumers (Coca Cola Enterprise). With this, OHSAS has come up with an appropriate and accepted standard way of measuring quality and safety standards. Its main aim is ensuring the protection of workers from dangerous work environments, conservation of the environment, and protection of consumers against possible health issues from the consumption of products from different organizations in the United States.

There are several aspects of the Coca Cola system where decision-making and the local control is never quite autonomous.  Rather, for the purpose of quality and food safety, the company has serious rigid standards in its system meant for assuring supply standards, brand protection, as well as, controlling of the manufacturing processes. For instance, the production of Coca Cola at a given manufacturing facility involves essential combination of four different parts including water, the secret –formula concentrate, carbonization and sweetener. With these few ingredients, any slight different in any of the products obviously change the ingredients of the final products. For instance, change in the quantity of water obviously changes the quality and the classic expected taste of the beverage (Lupo, 2013). Even with these kinds of controls, the company never leaves the final product quality to doubts or chance. It, however, conducts the at-trade sampling process of assurance. This process involves proper analysis of the final product in order to assert the acceptability in the market as well as its quality level in regards to the OHSAS standards. The company has contracts with third parties who purchase its products from its several retail stores. Coca Cola final products are tasted and analyzed for everything from general tastes to the label coding alignments. A monthly compilation of results upon which scores of each plant are graphed and further analyses made for the purpose of continuous in the plant and across the entire management system is available (Coca Cola Enterprise).

The employee participation is also an important aspect dealing with the promotion and production of quality products in Coca Cola Company. According to the organizational structure and culture, the company ensures that various rules regarding quality are strictly followed. Manufacturing processes directly involves the employees and not the management. Employees in any organization are under the department of the Human Resource Management. The HRM ensures that the company employs top quality workers with the appropriate skills of handling various manufacturing tools in the company (Lupo, 2013). Mishandling of machines obviously hinders the production of the desired quality products. The hierarchy of control in the production and distribution system also plays a great role in ensuring quality and safety products. The Coca Cola is a company run by a board of directors and a CEO. The major decision-maker in the company is the board of directors. The director’s decision is always in the interest of keeping Coke a global company producing the most desirable quality and affordable beverages.

Like any other company in the US or across the world, Coca Cola HRM department is involved in proper training of employees to keep up with the production of quality products. Virtually all new employees in the company undergo proper training for a fortnight or a month depending on the type of job to be done (The Coca Cola Company, 2007). These trainings mainly accentuate the knowledge and importance of producing high quality products and maintaining the global figure in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. The company ensures that all workers mainly in the department of quality and safety control are well versed with the working knowledge in the environmental and safety management systems such as OHSAS, ISO, and SQF. Besides, such recruits should have the knowledge in risk management. Risk management is important in the aforementioned department of the company since it ensures that eminent losses due to possible accidental low quality production are catered for. The company has an incident investigation procedure that ensures all activities that led to a particular flaw are stated and analyzed (Coca Cola Enterprise). Besides, individuals who may be responsible for such are investigated to find out the possible cause of the error. This has boosted the quality of products that Coca Cola produces ensuring the maintenance of its global status. Incident investigation in the company involves a team of members, few from other departments and the rest from the same department. In this case, comprehension of the various wrong steps and procedures becomes easier and recommendations written. For instance, in case of wrong ratio of the inputs, a team is always selected to investigate whether the source of the problem is person-based or machine-based.

The CCORE (Coca Cola Operating Requirements) serves the role of defining the standards, policies and requirements for safety management, and environmental quality in the operations of the company (The Coca Cola Company, 2004). KORE also requires the company’s distribution and manufacturing facilities to ensure the implementation of the British Standards Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series 18001 (BS OHSAS 18001), which is typically an appropriate framework for effective and excellent occupational safety and management system. KORE defines the already stated rigorous controls for managing the most common risks in the company. Besides this, KORE also defines appropriate training requirement for Coe associates. The training requirements are considered the global baseline and gives the most basic and crucial means of promoting quality and safety in the company. The training programs cover periodic and higher-induction refresher training for all the company associates as well as other workers who conduct work on behalf of the company. Examples of such workers are bottling industries in many companies. Coca Cola Company also relies on the audit reports of its internal auditors. Auditing report entails the various company activities and yields. Specifically, it looks into detail, the accounting aspects of the company providing the management with the losses and profits realized at each stage of production. The company tests and inspects requirements on a day-to-day basis to come up with the appropriate solution to the issues regarding quality and safety measures (Lupo, 2013). In order to boost the quality and safety management system, the company should involve itself on the search of well-trained personnel in handling the raw materials. Mixing and blending ratios, not only to maintain but also to improve the drink quality, requires a chemistry expertise.

References

Coca Cola Enterprise. Retrieved from <http://www.cokecce.com/>

Lupo, L. (2013). Coca Cola: Keeping real things local across the globe. From: http://www.qualityassurancemag.com/qa0413-coca-cola-company-profile.aspx

The Coca Cola Company (2004). Evolution 3: The Coca Cola Quality System. New York: Rutledge.From: http://www.zarate-consult.de/kosvet3/m5/KEET_M5_LU2_L1/Coca-Cola-QualityManagementSystem.pdf

The Coca Cola Hellenic (2008). Quality and Food Policy. From: www.cocacolahellenic.com/~/media/…/quality.pdf.

The Coca Cola Company (2007). Supplier requirements-ingredients. From: www.coca-colacompany.com/…/ingredient-sup.