This food safety agency dices and slices data

• By Trudy Walsh
• May 23, 2003

Since November, the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service has used a reporting application from ProClarity Corp. of Boise, Idaho, to give 300 employees a hawk's-eye view of 6,500 meat, poultry and egg processing plants.

ProClarity can create reports and graphs in seconds, said Peter Kuhmerker, director of the Field Automation and Information Management Division.

Most circuit supervisors travel a lot, so they run ProClarity on Gateway Inc. notebook PCs under either Microsoft Windows 95 or XP, Kuhmerker said. The software helps them identify plants that have sanitation problems or high levels of noncompliance.

Inspectors will upload reports daily to a database accessible by headquarters, Kuhmerker said. Their managers and supervisors can see quickly who hasn't provided feedback and take steps to improve the reporting.