This month the DN employee recognition award has been presented to Stephen Marsden, Brant Middleton, Wayne Sellers, Martin Armson, Katie Giles & Rob Sanderson for their outstanding effort during our UFAS audit.
UFAS (Universal Feed Assurance Scheme)
UFAS is a scheme that certifies animal feeds. UFAS aims to protect human and animal health by ensuring safe practices throughout the feed chain for food producing animals based on HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) principles. It verifies that the industry is meeting its obligations under the appropriate feed safety related legislation and codes of practice, in maintaining safety in the feed and food chain.
As an animal feed manufacturer we have an annual UFAS inspection which takes 3 days across both sites. Every aspect of the process is investigated and checked. The UFAS standard requires all documentation and monitoring to be relevant, maintained and kept up to date. This covers all aspects from sales process, raw material buying, manufacture, storage and transport. Pest control, testing and cleanliness are all inspected.
Procedures for every process within the sites are checked and followed through with monitoring documentation being assessed for correct recording. The risk of cross contamination from one feed to another which may be fed to different species of animals, is a key area, and therefore, ensuring the controls for manufacture are in place, as well as ensuring cleaning and maintenance are up to date, are crucially important.
Personnel are also assessed for their training and competency to ensure they understand why they are doing things in a certain way, to enable confidence in the safety of our feed going to animals.
Traceability is checked from raw materials entering site, to final product leaving, to monitor our ability to follow up if an issue ever occurred with risk to animal or human safety.
All areas of the business are involved and relevant for UFAS and it is important we all work together to improve our standards, as we did this time, to make sure we pass the inspection and continue to make feed that we are confident is safe for animal and human health.
Clitheroe Production manager, Simon Stock says, "In February we had our annual UFAS audit. It was also the beginning of our busiest production period of the year. Three members of the production team really stood out. Rob organised and kept the daily production on target. Also, with the assistance of Brant & Steven worked weekends to improve on the already good housekeeping standards. So that the mill was ready for the inspection. In recognition of their efforts, they were awarded employee’s of the month.".
Simon also goes on saying "Katie has been recognised as February employee of the month for her had work preparing all documentation for the UFAS audit, and participation in both sites audits. It was due to her commitment & diligence that both audits ran very smoothly."
Speke Production manager, Will Floyd says, "The reason Martin & Wayne had been put up for this award was down to their efforts for our UFAS audit. Not only did they work tirelessly to get Speke into shape for it, but also led the way with designating jobs and motivating the workforce to achieve a great result."
May we take this opportunity to sincerely thank Stephen, Brant, Wayne, Martin, Katie & Robert for all their hard work and commitment to Dugdale Nutrition.