Lionel MURAT
Lionel est co-fondateur de CIKLab. Ancien responsable de contrôle qualité, il est spécialisé dans la sous-traitance des analyses alimentaires.
Which KPIs to choose for Food Quality Control in 2025 ?
- Lionel MURAT
Why are indicators and KPIs essential for food quality control? How can they be selected to drive improvement and performance for your department and your company?
Gathering reliable data to construct your KPIs can be a challenge without the proper tools !
The Importance of Indicators for Quality Control
Quality control is a process that aims to verify with tangible evidence that the quality of a product meets regulatory, internal, and customer requirements.
It also allows for measuring the effectiveness of the production organization: is it deteriorating, maintaining, or improving? Quality control relies, by definition, on checks, tests, or analyses. The main goal is to prevent defective products from ending up with customers or, worse, with consumers.
To measure and improve its effectiveness, the quality control department must have :
- a clear and defined performance objective,
- means to measure current performance
- a comparison between performance and the objective in order to define corrective actions.
Let's take a car ride to understand the importance of indicators.
To understand the need and necessity of having and tracking indicators, the example of a car trip is very illustrative:
Imagine for a moment that you have to drive from Lille to Marseille with your family. Now picture yourself at the wheel and try to visualize a completely empty dashboard with no indications!
You will quickly start asking yourself some pertinent questions about driving.
- Do I have enough gas for the trip?
- How can I respect the speed limits?
- Am I safe (tire pressure, braking, signaling)?
- Etc.
There are a multitude of different indicators and not all will be suitable. It is based on the organization of your structure that you will determine the indicators to manage your control activity.
Therefore, it is crucial to have tracking indicators to collect reliable data in real time. These will then allow you to construct performance or efficiency indicators (KPIs)
The Tracking Indicators
To manage the activity, as we have seen, it is necessary to have reliable real-time data.
These data are tracking indicators, a snapshot of the activity. They already provide initial answers regarding the management of controls and their organization
💡 Tracking indicators generally serve as the basis for the development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Some examples of tracking indicators & KPI here :
What are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?
How to choose KPIs ?
The method for choosing good performance indicators is actually quite simple.
What is the purpose of my quality control process ? What is the output ?
💡 The output : these are products that have been checked and comply with the expected specifications (technical, legal, regulatory, and commercial).
What are the fundamental criteria for good KPIs ?
- (S) Specific: Specific and well-defined. They should be easily understood in terms of their meaning and evolution.
- (M) Measurable: Quantifiable, based on reliable and accessible data, and objective.
- (A) Achievable: Realistic and attainable based on available resources and set objectives.
- (R) Relevant: Directly linked to the strategic goals of your department and company.
- (T) Time-bound: Defined within a specific timeframe to evaluate results!
How to choose Quality Control KPIs?
For a quality control department, being efficient primarily means the ability to detect non-conformities with certainty. Detect them quickly and as far upstream as possible from the sale of a product. This means controlling the materials that enter the company, those that are in the process of being manufactured, and those that will be offered for sale. But, as is often the case, doing so with a limited budget and tight deadlines.
Let’s take an example:
For a given product and from one year to the next, let’s assume you have the same observation :
- You have controlled the same number of batches.
- You have performed the same number of control analyses.
- You have 100% compliance.
- You have no customer complaints.
Have you been efficient from one year to the next? From a control point of view : yes, because no non-compliant batch has been detected and therefore released.
💡 However, two performance levers can be implemented :
- Have you improved your release time? Has it deteriorated?
- Have you reduced the financial control load per batch? Or has it increased?
It’s clear that beyond the tracking indicators which can be good, you have the opportunity to set performance or efficiency objectives to be better!
What KPI for quality control?
Measure, improve !
Regardless of the KPIs you use, choose those for which you have the ability to intervene; you won’t improve the quality level of a supplier if no corrective action is imposed by the control department or the purchasing department!
Similarly, for them to be effective, the number of KPIs to track should be limited. Your KPIs are relevant at a given moment, based on your objectives. If the issues are resolved, if the objectives change, don’t hesitate to change your KPIs.
💡Your KPIs should enable you to improve, thus generating actions within your department or your company.
Harness reliable data with CIKLab!
The importance of tracking indicators and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in food quality control is crucial. However, collecting reliable data to build your KPIs can be a challenge without the right tools
🚨 When all control data, analysis results, deadlines, and costs are spread across multiple Excel files, it poses a risk :
- Errors: With multiple files and manual inputs, the risk of human errors increases.
- Inconsistency of data: When data is spread across multiple files, there can be inconsistencies.
- Inefficiency: Managing multiple Excel files can be time-consuming.
- It can be very difficult to quickly find the information you need, if not… discouraging!
CIKLab is an innovative solution designed to help food companies efficiently manage control analyses. It allows you to access real-time, reliable, up-to-date, and secure data to build your KPIs!
- You can register all your analysis providers.
- You manage all your analyses (specifications, methods, techniques, deadlines, costs, quantity).
- You schedule all your controls and their frequencies for each product.
- CIKLab automates all your analyses based on your control plans and subcontracted laboratories.
💡 Easily access all your control data with CIKLab :
- Tracking of batches in progress.
- Tracking of deadlines by analysis, product, laboratory, and batch.
- Tracking of control timeframes.
- Number of analyses conducted.
- Number of batches tested.
- Control costs.
- Conformity rate.
- Result history.
- And so on…
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