12 replies to this topic

[JPO]

My team is receiving dozens of food safety questionnaires per week.  These are darn close to paper audits that we are to fill out and return as part of their qualification procedures.

 

It takes roughly 2 people working full time to fill in and return these documents.  Some of them are 50-80 pages long.  Like I said, they are pretty close to "fill it in yourself" desk audits.  We are a distributor and have adequate food safety records, but sometimes the questions get into super minutia that require detailed conversations with our vendors. 

 

I know from talking to colleagues that this is becoming even more common than it was in the past.  I was wondering if anyone had any Grand Sweeping Knowledge that might help me better address this with my team so I am not burning up 2/3 of 3 people's days filling in forms. We have played with the idea of sending stock answers, sending certifications, setting a "floor" of sales where we will do this level of documentation (if you buy a truckload a day, absolutely.  If you buy a 10kg bag a year, no way). 

 

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope. 

[zanorias]

Do you have an accreditation? I often find customer questionnaires will be many pages long, but those holding a GFSI benchmarked scheme will only need to fill in the contact details and return it with their cert attached, rather than filling in all 15 pages.

 

If the same questions are frequently asked you could do an information package though be sure to keep it up to date. This may reduce the number of questions asked. Though some customers will likely want you to fill out their questionnaire format.

 

Ultimately having a customer is a commercial thing and on the lines of your last paragraph, it may well be a decision of "is the workload worth the value of the customer". We've dropped a customer recently after their requirements became so OTT that is simply wasn't worth the time and resources to comply considering the sales were so small.

[MsMars]

When I worked for a smaller company and sent a request out for supplier documentation, a lot of the larger companies would send me a standard packet that they sent out to everyone when they received requests. I certainly understand that they can become time consuming because I'm on the other end of that now! 

[Lesley.Roberts]

When I worked for a smaller company and sent a request out for supplier documentation, a lot of the larger companies would send me a standard packet that they sent out to everyone when they received requests. I certainly understand that they can become time consuming because I'm on the other end of that now! 

 

This is precisely the way we work this - AA customers always have their paperwork completed, smaller customers get a "pack" including relevant certificates (BRC, organic, kosher, Halal etc.) organogram, relevant HACCP plan, specs etc. etc.

We agreed this way of working with the sales director & so far have had very few complaints/comments - where customers object I advise that they have been supplied with sufficient information to complete their own paperwork - should they wish.

 

My team are technical professionals, they are not clerks & their resource is best used making improvements within the factories, rather than filling in paperwork.

 

The only ones we fill in now are those related to materials, not site certification (Ie supplier assurance questionnaires)

[SQFconsultant]

You need a one-size-fits-all solution and that is easy.

 

Look at the last 10 or so questionaires you have recieved (and this is what we did for our clients) and catalog each question, you'll have a bunch of the same questions and then the more standard ones - list them out and answer each question - make a master and that is what you will send in response along with a copies of any certifications that you have.

 

Easy peasy and we won't even send you a bill.

[pHruit]

As per others' suggestions:

• A standard "information pack" with your certs, process flow diagram, site allergen details etc and a standard questionnaire, possibly with/without your own third-party audit report if you have one.
• A system to classify the value of customers - we have a threshold below which you're only going to get the standard information pack, then customers above this get completion of some of their own format questionnaires. We may still decline to complete them if obviously covered by BRC, or they're asking about things that are commercial confidential / part of our Intellectual Property. There is then a far higher threshold above which customers get this same service, but with a faster turnaround time. This is reserved for very significant key accounts only (or those with significant potential, subject to sign-off by sales director)

Make sure you get the buy-in from your colleagues in sales - they will need to help in saying "no" to the customers, and will have to take responsibility for managing this relationship. Talk it through with your sales manager/director and they'll almost certainly understand. Alternatively their choice is that you need to hire more people and charge it out as a sales cost, which they won't want as it'll hit their margin...

Get them involved in helping classifying accounts, and rolling it out to the broader sales team to make sure that they're going to support it.  

[FoodSafetyPlanet]

I feel sorry for the summer intern stuck reading 80 pages of answers. 

[AHJ]

When I first started I was very annoyed at all the vendors that sent us a packet of their Prerequisite programs and left our questionnaire blank. It was unnerving to me that everyone is trying to get through their GFSI audits and this is a requirement no matter which program your company is doing. So you would expect them to understand the point and just fill it out. It seemed quite unprofessional to me at the time.  Now that our company is expanding and I am getting the same requests I understand the huge packets and the blank questionnaires. My company has also adapted to this approach. 

 

In our packet we now have:

- Company mission statement and commitment to Food Safety and Quality 

- Description of our facility/grounds/address etc. 

- Contact information for the Quality Department  

- Specification sheets / Labeling information 

- Fair Trade Documents 

- Country of origin statement 

- The last pages of our HACCP plans that is basically a summary of CCPs for each plan. 

- Allergen assessment with a chart that comprises our control programs 

- Summary of our foreign material prevention program and controls 

- Summary of our Environmental Monitoring Program 

- Kosher Certificate

- Third party Certificate 

- The summary of results page from our last audit (from the certification body) 

- Continuous Food Guarantee

 

Everyone who requests a questionnaire to be filled out gets the same packet with a letter from our Quality Manager that basically states "unfortunately this request cannot be fulfilled at this time. Please refer to this packet that we have put together to answer any questions you may have about our commitment to food safety and the programs and procedures we employ in our facility." 

 

The only questionnaires we take the time to fill out are for our contract manufacturers.

[Deena185]

Standard pack could be a solution but issue could be that more and more companies use online solutions for questionaires , specs etc. Still need to fill requests there

[pHruit]

Standard pack could be a solution but issue could be that more and more companies use online solutions for questionaires , specs etc. Still need to fill requests there

This is what the third-party providers of these systems want you to think, but I can confirm from first-hand experience that it is still entirely possible to say "sorry, no - here is a standard information pack"

[Timwoodbag]

Seems like a golden opportunity.  An online platform where you can fill in an answer to every single question under the sun.  You then hand select what questions you would like to ask other companies.  Company A asks Company B for their info, and are automatically given the answer to all of their hand selected questions.  Just need a few major players to get involved, forcing thousands of suppliers to use this service, and then no one would ever need to worry again. Hell a big company struggling with this just might make a financial investment themselves to ensure questions they need answered are in the Standard Form everyone fills out initially.  

[pHruit]

Seems like a golden opportunity.  An online platform where you can fill in an answer to every single question under the sun.  You then hand select what questions you would like to ask other companies.  Company A asks Company B for their info, and are automatically given the answer to all of their hand selected questions.  Just need a few major players to get involved, forcing thousands of suppliers to use this service, and then no one would ever need to worry again. Hell a big company struggling with this just might make a financial investment themselves to ensure questions they need answered are in the Standard Form everyone fills out initially.  

 

You'd think so, but it ends up with the classic predicament that we see with e.g. most major retailers/brands having different standards.

Not sure how prevalent these systems are elsewhere in the world, but in the UK they have become very popular - to some extent they're marketed as a way to efficiently outsource supplier technical management, which obviously appeals to businesses as it requires fewer of their own staff. In practice it simply transfers the work to their suppliers, and to the people who work for these third party platforms - alas the latter have little to no connection with the actual supply chain, ingredients etc., so their input tends to be "you've got to fill out this box in this way because the computer says so", even when it's nonsensical or not applicable for the product/site/process.

 

The bigger challenge is that there is money to be made here, so multiple different systems/options have sprung up, and they're not cross-compatible. We therefore have important customers on each of the major online platforms and thus have to re-enter the same data many times over. Very few allow upload of data from e.g. an Excel file, and generally they need laboriously completing and take far longer to fill out than putting the equivalent data into an MS Word/Excel questionnaire would. Also, some of them make us pay for the privilege of using the platforms to provide data to our customers in the way that the customer has mandated - obviously this is a cost of doing business, but paying for the privilege of spending hours filling out dull and often useless questionnaires is a touch frustrating. You can tell I'm not a fan!

There is perhaps a gap in the market for a system that addresses this better, but it would need significant uptake and would need to be cheap to use, as it's got to tempt people away from the other similar systems they're already using and they don't really seem to be interested in how easy it is or isn't for the supplier.

[dgt39]

'I feel sorry for the summer intern stuck reading 80 pages of answers.'

 

Not sure many of these even get read!

To many its just a 'tick box' exercise