BRC Root Causes from Last Audit

How can you route cause a non conformity when the item/system concerned has been in place for more than 5 years and hasn't been raised before. Can you route cause it as interpretation of the standard? If so how can you put in corrective action of the route cause?

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How can you route cause a non conformity when the item/system concerned has been in place for more than 5 years and hasn't been raised before. Can you route cause it as interpretation of the standard? If so how can you put in corrective action of the route cause?

Hi,It depends on the specific issue. It may be due to standard change, development in industry ( e.g. new risks as melamine etc) or not noticed during previous audits as there is always some amount of sampling. Root cause would than be not fully understood or forgotten changed requirements of the standars, not following of the actual issues during HACCP or management review, or as you mentioned misinterpretation of the standard. Base on that, corrective action may be training, system to follow actual developments etc.Regards,Miroslav

Hi,It depends on the specific issue. It may be due to standard change, development in industry ( e.g. new risks as melamine etc) or not noticed during previous audits as there is always some amount of sampling. Root cause would than be not fully understood or forgotten changed requirements of the standars, not following of the actual issues during HACCP or management review, or as you mentioned misinterpretation of the standard. Base on that, corrective action may be training, system to follow actual developments etc.Regards,Miroslav

Root cause mean you need to to go to bottom of the problems and resolve to prevent reoccurring of this NC.
hope this help
regards
Min

Dear classic,

Welcome to the forum!

Route ??

As per previous posts, you are most likely to get relevant advice if you add a little detail to yr query, eg regarding NC, product, process.

Rgds / Charles.C

Hmm. I think you have to remember that even 5 year old quality systems which have been audited regularly will have issues. An auditor cannot cover 100% of that quality system and so any audit is just a sample.

When I started in my current role there were 101 things I thought were wrong with the quality system and yet, this place had passed BRC (albeit at 'B' grade) and passed loads of customer audits. Many of the items I raised were simply due to not realising it was an issue. If I'd had to use '5 whys' on that though I would have struggled to conclude anything but "the technical manager was an idiot" as the 5th why...

Not suggesting that for your site though! Just opinions and experience can affect how you see things.

I suspect from the tone of your post you disagree with the non conformance?

How can you route cause a non conformity when the item/system concerned has been in place for more than 5 years and hasn't been raised before. Can you route cause it as interpretation of the standard? If so how can you put in corrective action of the route cause?

Greetings from the other side of the pond!


While I am not BRC certified, I am SQF certified (GFSI). While I don't know thenature of your NC, from an SQF and HACCP standpoint, if you can show a riskassessment that what you are doing isn't causing a risk to product safety basedon historical data, it may help. I only label product produced at another SQF facility,so i have very low risk, but the company has been doing basically the samething for over 20 years. We had been AIB for years and when SQF came around,another Practitioner wanted to reinvent the wheel because the SQF code said todo this or do that and those things weren't applicable to us. We sat the HACCPteam down and said here is what we do, here is what the code says, is what weare doing putting food safety at risk? If no, why not? That was our riskassessment in a nut shell.

Like i said, I'm SQF and don't know what your NC was, but that may help.

Don