Food Safety and Quality Management System

Hello all, I was curious about the FSMA vs Food safety and Quality Management System it is a 2 part question. 1. Does the Food Safety and Quality Management System  need to actually be a written program or is having a drive on a protected network with all SOP, SSOP, and Programs count as the management  system. All of the instructions and trainings schedules are found with the correlating SOP. So, do I need to write a program on how we navigate the protected drive? 2. If I do need to write a program explaining the system how does it differ from the FSMA Plan? This seems a bit redundant to me. Thanks In Advance.

Hello all, I was curious about the FSMA vs Food safety and Quality Management System it is a 2 part question. 1. Does the Food Safety and Quality Management System  need to actually be a written program or is having a drive on a protected network with all SOP, SSOP, and Programs count as the management  system. All of the instructions and trainings schedules are found with the correlating SOP. So, do I need to write a program on how we navigate the protected drive? 2. If I do need to write a program explaining the system how does it differ from the FSMA Plan? This seems a bit redundant to me. Thanks In Advance.

Happily no direct involvement with FSMA but if it is requires a documented system (does it ?) the latter would presumably require a set of documents.

You can set it up however it works for you and your understanding of it. What I did is I have a folder on our protected network drive titled 'Food Safety and Quality Management System' which includes every folder and document that we use including out Food Safety Plan. I did create a word document called 'Policy Manual' which breaks down each folder and starts with a table of contents then I continue to list what is included in each folder with a one sentence summary. No one has ever looked at it but it is there in case anyone, including auditors or customers, wanted a brief overview of our WHOLE system. 

Hope this helps you!

The way I handled it - which was fine with BRC inspectors - was to have one document called "Quality Management System" that listed all of the programs relevant to the quality system, and a brief description of each. The QMS document then referenced a more in-depth document for each topic. So, for instance, for foreign object detection I would mention inspection at receiving (and link out to the receiving SOP), metal detectors/x-rays (and link out to the metal detection/x-ray SOP), PPE requirements, etc. One of the nice things about doing it this way is that it was a good way to introduce new employees to our quality system without dropping 100 SOPs in their laps, and also a nice way to introduce potential customers to our system without giving them too many specifics. The only thing that was tedious was updating the QMS document if any of the linked SOPs changed, so if you go this route make sure that you don't get overly specific in the QMS document so you don't have to change things in two places.

Hope that helps.