New Member - First Question

[GoataGirl]

Hello, Thank you for adding me to your forum.  My name is Tina and I am from Oregon, USA. I have started a new job, training as a cheesemaker.  The small farm I work for is fairly disorganized.  One task I have taken on is scheduling the flipping days for the aged cheese. Is there a database or common spreadsheet that I can use? How does everyone keep track?  Thank you

[feather]

That's a cool job! I don't have an answer, I'm a home cheese maker. Maybe you could contact a few cheese factories and see what they do. There's a bunch of them in Wisconsin and they have websites, you might be able to email them and get some answers. I've had really good luck emailing dairys and dairy producers asking questions from their websites. They seem pretty kind and informative. Go Girl.

[GoataGirl]

Thank you Feather, for your response. Those are some great ideas! I will do that

[mikekchar]

When I used to teach English, I had classrooms of 40 odd people.  I needed to keep track of which people I had interacted with in a class (because with a 50 minute long class and 40 people, that leaves me a little over 1 minute of interaction per person -- so if I forget you, then it could be a *long* time before I'm able to interact with you again).  I used to make a map of the classroom with all the desks and I carried it all the time.  Whenever I interacted with someone, I would write a check mark on the map.  I told the students it was for "participation marks", but it was a total lie, because I was ensuring that everybody got the same amount of interaction ;-).

Anyway, if it were me, I think that's what I'd do with the cheeses too.  Since you probably don't want to write something down on every flip, I think I would map out areas and then just count how many cheeses I flipped in that area as I was doing it.  When I was done, I'd write down the number.  If the diagram is big enough (possibly you need several), you can jot down maybe a week of flipping numbers for each area.

BTW, I've spent most of my career as a software developer and spent an inordinate amount of time on processes.  The above will probably work well if *you* are doing it.  It will probably *not* work well if you get someone else to do it -- they will likely just write down the same number each time.  The very surprising thing about human nature is that even when people know the reason for doing a process like this, they will always optimise it to be less effort.  If you need some measure of process compliance, it's best to have a visual indicator that the cheese has been flipped (maybe a sticky that is on the edge of the wheel and near the top or bottom -- when you flip the cheese you can see whether or not the top or bottom is up) and then go in after the fact and inspect them.

[GoataGirl]

Thank you mikekchar,  This might work for two people.  I will certainly give it a try. There are actually 3 people involved in flipping the cheese.  First is the master cheesemaker/owner, he of course has his own system but has asked me to take over.  I may have to learn his way. The last two are an assistant, who I trust to do a thorough job, and I.