What policies and procedures are required for our off-site storage facility?
Hi All,
I work for a food packaging manufacturer and we have an off site storage facility less than 10 miles from our site and is owned by ourselves. We store only fully enclosed finished goods at this site, so no WIP goods or materials. Our BRC audit is due this year and we are making our CB aware of our facility and it will be included in our audit.
What I am looking to know is what policies/procedures would we need to implement for our facility?
Currently on our production site we have our required policies such as Personal Hygiene, Visitor Questionnaires etc. Could we include the off site storage facility in the policies we currently have in place (as in amend our current procedures/policies) or will we need to create new specific ones for the storage facility itself?
TIA
https://www.sqfi.com...d-8.1-FINAL.pdf
I believe it will be audited against SQF Storage & Distribution.
We have the same facility but we did not include it.
EDIT: Oops I realised its not SQF and it is BRC. My bad :)
As long as you own it and it is run under your company name you can go one of two ways...
1. Tell your CB about it, include it in your scope and amend your documentation at your main facility to include the storage facility and ensure that it meets all requirements of your storage areas that you have at your main facility.
In your message I saw that you were telling them - but you did not say that you told them already -- let's assume for #2 that you haven't told them about your off-site finished goods DC...
2. Don't tell your CB about it. That way no amending documents, no need for the Auditor to add in an inspection for the facility.
We did include our outside storage facility into our FSSC scope, it happened several years ago. I didn't develop new programs, just added warehouse-related parts to the existing programs. Though, I developed some new forms (e.g. warehouse cleaning record, temperature check, and inspection). Since then, FSSC audits included plant & warehouse, all of them went well, I've never had problems with this. So, with FSSC it's not a big deal - but BRC's a different story:) That's why I hate it...
The Appendix 3 states the audit may cover your both sites as long as:
• all sites are operated against the same documented quality management system
• the sites are no more than 30 miles/50 km apart.
• all sites must be visited as part of the same audit schedule
etc.
IMO, your policies could be shared between them.