Annual Management Review vs. Internal Audit?
Hello everyone,
We are going for SQF certification soon and we are finishing up the last of our documentation requirements for the desk audit. But we still have a few things to cover which brings me to the following question/confusion:
I am a bit confused at differentiating between the Annual Management Review (Doc. Code 2.1.3) and the Internal Audit (Doc. Code 2.5.5).
We modified the SQF Checklist to be more concise and completed our internal audit. This went through all of the SQF elements with statements of "evidence" as to how we have documents or procedures supporting the elements of the code in its entirety.
Now with the annual management review, I have read previous posts on the forum and the guidance document. I am aware of the sections the guidance specifies (policy manual, internal/external audits, complaints etc..). Then I read on the forum that some SQF users have documented this management review as a checklist... seems similar to what we did for the internal audit.
My question is, can someone help clarify the difference between the two sections and more importantly, how did you document the annual management review? As written paragraphs, another checklist...?
Thank you for your help!
Jenna
About nine years ago we started designing and developing SQF systems for companies and all we ever put together for the annual management review was a statement page that is signed off by those involved in the 1-2 day review of the entire SQF and related system documents, externals, etc.
We never got into checklists or anything else elaborate and every single auditor has accepted this process.
I guess one can make it as involved as they want but this is what works for us.
As to Internal Audits, we customize an internal audit schedule based on the facility, what they do, how they do it, etc.
The Internal Audit program that we just finished does use checklists for each internal audit type such as:
Pre-Op
Transporters (they have their own fleet of trucks)
Transporter Mechanical (the truck maintenace and repair shop onsite)
Packaging storage building
Welds
Pest Control devices
etc.
Pre-Op is once a day at about 4am
and then we grid out the schedule for each type of audit with a cross functional team doing them - Welds is a new one for us, in this facility their are a lot of them.
Some are weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, etc.
Annual management review is more of summarizing the year's data (or whichever period make sense to you) and making your management team or anyone relevant to food safety aware of how you did for the year (or period) such that you review the trends, complaints, deviations encountered, any recurring deviations that weren't addressed yet and causing issues? Do you have some S.M.A.R.T goals for food safety - say how many complaints in a year? did you met them? why or why not? or did you close all work orders in a required time frame? why or why not? These are the things you review or look into during management review -- your overall food safety program status - is it ok? barely okay? needs improvement? or you're failing? Your management needs to know and be aware of all these things so food safety certification is not just a paper to wipe their a** off.
While internal audit is an audit - monitoring or verification that your procedures and processes are in place. This can be done using checklist etc. matched against the SQF clauses. You use internal audit as a measuring tool, a gauge of your food safety compliance - you summarize the trends for all the internal audit conducted at the end of the period and this is what you use to come up with data for the management review.
I think you're just confused with the format of using a checklist -- both can be done using a checklist, but these two have different content and purpose.