Journal of Tea Science Research. 2015, Vol. 5, No. 6, 1-14
4
industries to reduce the waste while optimizing the
productivity through maintaining an orderly
workplace with the use of visual cues to accomplish
highly consistent operational outputs (Janakiraman
and Gopal, 2007; Parrie, 2007; Gapp et al., 2008).
Nevertheless, some of the empirical analysis had
demonstrated that the successful implementation of
5S significantly improve the organization’s financial
and operational performance (Salaheldin, 2009).
The Sri Lankan tea industry has adapted various
quality tools to improve productivity, efficiency,
customer satisfaction, food safety as well as
environmental sustainability and social wellbeing.
However, these systems were operated separately
where it generated additional costs to the operation
while making it is complex as well as not properly
operated according to the requirements. Due to that
fact, most of the adapted systems were abandoned,
weakly operated or virtually existed only for auditing
dates. In contrast, 5S implementations which were
initially promoted by the Sri Lanka Tea Board had
gained the significance where it was drifted in to the
all existing tea factories up to a certain extent while
some of the factories were operating at extraordinary
conditions. Most of the employees were also aware
about 5S and they practiced it in their workplaces.
The research was further intended to study and
select the basic areas of interventions compatible
with ISO 22000:2005; which could be merged to
ISO 22000 FSMS with or without modifications to
its original implementation objectives while designin
-g relevant document formats.
Thus study was focus to understand effectiveness
and efficiency of 5S applications in the orthodox
black tea manufacturing process and apply the 5S
methodology in synchronization with ISO 22000:
2005 to develop a hybrid generic model which can
be customized according to the factory requirements.
The research further intended to identify highly
compatible areas and adaptable interventions in tea
industry with ISO 22000 while developing necessary
formats to use in food safety generic model. The
findings of the work were incorporated into ISO
22000 generic model which will help tea manufa-
cturing facilities to easily adapt ISO 22000 FSMS
while amending their existing 5S systems to match
with relevant regulations.
Materials & Methods
The study was designed to evaluate the major food
safety violations in tea supply chain with a special
attention to tea manufacturing process. Current food
safety applications, their efficiency and constraints
to implement proper food safety management
systems in tea industry as well as to find out reliable
solutions with minimizing or eliminating the
existing complications was the main objective of the
study. The sampling plan was stratified random
sampling, with the use of Factory Information.xls
provided by the Sri Lanka Tea Board. The excel
sheet contained contact information and addresses of
the tea factories which was used to select tea
factories from the low grown orthodox black tea
manufacturing industries based on whether they had
a food safety certification or not and then 30
factories from each group. The following areas were
selected due to the easy access as well as shorter
distances between factories where concentration of
factories was high. The most prominent area was the
Southern province due to the fact that law grown tea
manufacturing was prominent throughout the
province while Galle, Matara and Rathnapura
districts were set as major target areas for the project
execution considering the objective of analyzing low
grown orthodox black tea manufacturing industry.
The project has two phases for execution and sample
size for each phase was 30 factories and cumulative
target was to evaluate 60 low grown orthodox black
tea manufacturers where phase II was focused on the
factories which have ISO 22000/ISO 9001/HACCP
systems or Good Manufacturing Practices with
Japanese 5S implementations. However, there were
number of tea factories which had abandoned the
implemented food safety management systems due
to various reasons, where additional priority was
given to understand the problems they faced, that led
to abandoning as well as to find out the remaining
practices and their efficacy.
