Optimize Your Workflow with Icicle’s Task Management

Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, successfully running a food production facility is a mammoth undertaking that involves careful task management for processes, maintenance, employees, health and safety regulations and more. Keeping track of tasks within your organization – for those working on site and at home – has never been more crucial in order to maintain a safe, highly efficient facility that is compliant with new regulations. 

Icicle’s innovative task management infrastructure is designed to help you streamline your workflow in a variety of ways, from assigning and monitoring maintenance tasks to making sure you’re fully prepared for HACCP certifications or audits. Our software can help you to improve communications and efficiency across the board, saving you valuable time that you can spend on growing your business.

Icicle cuts out the need for mountains of paperwork and makes assigning and monitoring tasks easy. As Sheryl from Natural Grocers explains:

“I used to have to send around Word forms for corrective actions around to everybody, but it was hard to get people to complete them. With the task assigning feature, everything is streamlined – no more scanning and sending documents.”

Sheryl Grider, QA Manager at Natural Grocers

Set Up Alerts and Notifications for Tasks

Whatever aspect of the food production process you or your team is involved in, tasks can work for you. On the most basic level, it saves managers the time necessary to track and follow up on employee tasks. 

With Icicle, it’s easy to set up alerts that email employees when they are assigned a task. Once the task has been assigned, it will also appear on their dashboard as well as your own. Once they have completed the task, they can check it off along with any relevant notes.

Schedule Recurring Tasks

There are lots of tasks around any production facility that repeat themselves, whether that be quality checks, routine maintenance, or inspections. In Icicle, you can set automatically recurring tasks in one go. Upcoming tasks and their status can be viewed on the dashboard, giving you all the information you need in one place.

Create User Teams

It’s often the case that managers need to set tasks but don’t have the time to think about which employee has the required skills and availability to complete it. Icicle allows you to assign tasks to User Teams for the team leader to then delegate them later on.

Sheryl explains how it works in practice:

“We also recently began using the Teams feature. We have a new employee who is dealing with all the work requests for equipment maintenance. With this feature, I can easily assign maintenance tasks to the corresponding team member.”

Sheryl Grider, QA Manager at Natural Grocers

Keep Everyone on Track with Tasks and Meetings Integration

Icicle’s Meeting Records function also integrates seamlessly with its task management infrastructure to enable you to track attendance, keep minutes and set follow-up tasks for employees. Everyone tasked to the meeting (whether they are in attendance or not) receives the information they need, and the system reminds employees of task deadlines until they are completed. Not only does this highly organized system save you time and paperwork; it also ensures you remain compliant with OHS regulations by keeping records of your safety meetings, which you may be required to show during an audit or inspection.

Minimize Equipment Downtime with Task Management

It’s crucial for food production facilities to stay on top of maintenance tasks to prevent any potentially costly machinery breakdowns. Icicle’s task management infrastructure enables you to quickly and easily assign maintenance tasks or inspections to keep everything running smoothly. 

A simple dashboard interface allows you to attach maintenance tasks to individual pieces of equipment, which you can then assign to a specific employee. You can also set a completion date and assign someone to verify the task. You can even automatically set recurring tasks for machinery that needs to be checked weekly, monthly and so on.

Use Task Management to Stay on Top of Employee Training

Especially in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s essential that your employees are fully trained to follow your SOPs to reduce risk of virus transmission. Icicle makes it simple to schedule worker training, approve training and keep track of which individuals have been trained on specific procedures. Automated task reminders are issued for upcoming training to make sure nothing is missed, and employees can be flagged for retraining if incidents arise.

Implement Rapid Corrective Actions

It is inevitable that issues arise in the food production process, so Icicle makes it easy to catch problems before they become Problems. Get on top of any issues immediately by assigning corrective actions for a failed inspection point. You can then track and monitor outstanding tasks to ensure the smooth running of the program.

Using Icicle’s task management to address corrective actions also creates that golden paper trail to show to your auditors or inspectors.

Track Your COVID-19 Prevention and Control Plan

The food production industry is facing significant challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From outbreaks of the virus among workers to global supply chain disruptions, food businesses need a robust system to mitigate the risk of virus transmission. To that end, the Icicle team has developed a COVID-19 Prevention and Control System with pre-packaged collections of procedures, policies, and active control interfaces.

We know that there is so much to keep track of right now, and that’s why Icicle’s task management infrastructure can help you move through health and safety targets at rapid speed and with unparalleled clarity for your organization. A COVID-19 Prevention and Control Plan dashboard helps you stay on top of tasks related to your pandemic response, making implementation seamless for your workers on any device with an internet connection, whether they are on site or at home.

Icicle’s Task Management Infrastructure:  An Intelligent Digital Solution

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s never been more critical to maintain stringent, highly organized processes to keep your business compliant and safe. 

Icicle’s task management infrastructure is just one more way that digital solutions like Icicle can help businesses easily achieve greater productivity and efficiency. As Steve Brewer, network co-ordinator of the Internet of Food Things has said, “The elusive goal of greater productivity can be found in a number of pioneering innovations in the food sector,” enabling companies to “reap the full potential of digitalization” and make the most of intelligent, future-proof solutions like Icicle.  

If you’d like to learn more about how Icicle’s task management infrastructure could streamline your processes, save you time, and help you remain compliant with COVID-19 regulations, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team or request a free demo.