Supplier Compliance Monitoring

Hi All

I'm working on an automated way to monitor supplier compliance performance (certification, food safety alert performance, regulatory compliance) in the food supply chain and am looking for some points of view to help with this, specifically:

1. My view is that most are doing this on an ad-hoc basis and mostly paying lip service to the task, which can be very onerous but I need to confirm if my view is broadly correct or not. What is your view on how industry currently monitors supplier compliance? 

2.  I am looking at bringing information together from multiple data sources but want to confirm that I have all the main, trusted, sources of data covered. What sources of supplier compliance information are you using?

Many thanks for your responses in advance.

James

Hi James

Interesting question!.

I work for a company that supplies ingredients to food manufacturers across numerous countries.  These ingredients are sourced worldwide so this starts with a risk assessment per product type/country of origin/volume.

All new suppliers are assessed using this risk assessment model & dependent on identified risk they are either audited or are required to provide specific documents (eg. pesticide results/heavy metal/environmental pathogen monitoring results/TACCP/VACCP/HACCP etc.). 

These records are stored in a cloud based system (with expiry dates so we’d know, for example, when a supplier’s BRC certification expired & they would be obliged to add the updated certificate when due) and documents are checked to approve a new supplier. This is linked to our specification system so that each delivery is recorded and assessed, allowing us to register any non-conformances and to monitor the supplier’s ongoing performance (reassessing the risk dependent on this).

There is also a separate quarterly risk assessment (survey of RASFF/FDA recalls & equivalent for other regions) linked to specific regions/product types and we also monitor country specific alert sites (eg. FSA) continually.  Part of the T&C of trading is that a manufacturer is obliged to advise us if they lose certification or have a food safety incident – obviously this relies on self-declaration unless you have a huge team and/or the resource to monitor this continually?.

It’s early days for us but it seems to be working quite well so far & the benefit of the cloud based system is that quality/procurement contacts at all sites are advised immediately if there is an issue with a specific supplier.

Best of luck – supplier management is always a challenging area & I haven’t yet seen any system that is 100% foolproof.

We've always worked our supplier performance program manually, which is really inefficient and extremely time consuming. However, in the places where I have worked, the buy-in to go to an automated system has never been there. I have noted over the last 3 years or so, many customers have started using portals for document collection and automated supplier management. It still seems to me the vast majority of customers are still using manual methods for managing suppliers though. 

Hi All

 

I'm working on an automated way to monitor supplier compliance performance (certification, food safety alert performance, regulatory compliance) in the food supply chain and am looking for some points of view to help with this, specifically:

 

1. My view is that most are doing this on an ad-hoc basis and mostly paying lip service to the task, which can be very onerous but I need to confirm if my view is broadly correct or not. What is your view on how industry currently monitors supplier compliance? 

 

2.  I am looking at bringing information together from multiple data sources but want to confirm that I have all the main, trusted, sources of data covered. What sources of supplier compliance information are you using?

 

Many thanks for your responses in advance.

 

James

Hi James,

I deduce your OP is effectively/implicitly focused on "Supplier Approval".

IMO this significantly depends on which GFSI-recognised Standard (if any) is involved since the specific requirements can be (surprisingly?) variable Driving Forces..  For example  -

The BRC8 textual expectations are IMO semantically Machiavellian. And an encyclopedical mix of Quality/Safety/Regulatory/Fraudulency topics.

SQF8's requirements are, at first sight, more simply worded but sometimes contain incomprehensible/ambiguous content. Separated into Safety/Quality Standards.

IFS's textual requirements are often weirdly worded in general, probably due translational difficulties. Separated ?(not a User).

ISO22000 as might be expected have virtually no prescriptive requirements at all. Safety only.

My point is that the requests in your OP may perhaps need additional context/refining..