Vocation stories – Quality control laboratory manager, Cedenco Foods

Fran Edwards trained as a medical laboratory technician. Now she manages a lab ensuring products meet customer specifications.

Duration: 01:24

Transcript

I’m medical-laboratory-scientist trained and I’ve worked in medical laboratories from the time I left school. After about 20 years I went and worked in a plant-virus testing laboratory. I set that up, and we tested for plant viruses and we did a lot of DNA work.

After that I moved here to Cedenco. I manage the staff. We usually have about seven to eight staff on during the season we work 24 hours, seven days a week. Everyday I check the results of the previous 24 hours and make sure that everything's within the customer’s specifications. Meanwhile, during the day the staff have been reporting to the production supervisors to keep them up to date if anything’s gone wrong.

I also do the allocating of the product to all the customers. I access a database that’s got all the results, and then I have to allocate certain lots to certain customers depending on their specifications. The database does sort it quite well, but there’s a lot of customers that just have funny little quirky requirements so I have to make sure that it fits exactly what they want.