Contribute to developing production specifications in a food and drink environment
Overview
This standard is about the skills and knowledge needed for you to contribute to developing product specifications in food and drink manufacturing and associated supply chain. Specifications are an integral part of the production of food and drink products; they are needed to ensure products are made consistently and adhere to quality and compliance requirements. Contributing to the conversion of a qualitative request into a technical specification is a key skill.
You must be able to identify criteria necessary to comply with the requirements of the specification, determine where your input is needed and evaluate your recommendations and agree a final specification with relevant people.
This standard is for you if you work in food and drink manufacture and/or supply operations and are involved in developing product specifications in food and drink manufacture.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
* Identify criteria*
- source the criteria required for the development of a product specification
- liaise with relevant people to obtain qualitative input into the development of technical specification
- check with relevant people the area/s of the product specification requiring your input
**Draft criteria and consult with colleagues
**
4. collate the input into the specification
5. present the specification according to organisational and customer requirements
6. evaluate the specification criteria checking they continue to be relevant to the customer, product and process requirements
7. amend the specification input in view of evaluation findings
**Agree and submit final specification
**
8. communicate the specification criteria to relevant people
9. agree a final specification
10. submit the final specification to relevant internal or external people for approval
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
- how to contribute to the development process within the limits of your authority
- the regulatory and organisational requirements for the development of food product specifications
- the organisational methods of communication including information technology and how to use them
- what the organisational and customer requirements are for the content and layout of the specification
- why it is important to liaise with colleagues across functions to gather information and data to input into the specification
- the sources of information and data required to input into the specification
- how to source information and data relating to the specification
- the format of the specification
- why it is important to evaluate the need for continued use of individual specification criteria and how to do this
- why it is important to agree a final specification and how to do this