Approved Supplier Program

Hello,

I am setting the approved supplier program and found out all our suppliers are "sourced" from a produce group where 3rd party audits and all the fun to request documents to approve suppliers are. My question is, can I redact my policy mentioning that we obtain produce from approved suppliers from such groups and that documents are available for reference at their portal? That way on an inspection I can just pull the website and consult some supplier documents from there.

Of course I would have some hard copies of the most important ones for immediate reference on an inspection.

What do you think?

Thanks for the help!

Hi, welcome to the forum! Sure you can do it: no standard states you should have hard copies of your documents. I stopped having hard copies of my docs many years ago, and have been printing them only if an auditor's been asking.

Thank you! I really want to avoid having to print that much paper and having those huge binders with hard copies ready for an audit.

Thank you for the help!

Hi, welcome to the forum! Sure you can do it: no standard states you should have hard copies of your documents. I stopped having hard copies of my docs many years ago, and have been printing them only if an auditor's been asking.

As long as you have access to the documents, it's fine.

Now, during the audit when an auditor asks you for something and you can't retrieve it because the website is down or there are connectivity issues, that's a problem  :shades:

Does not mean you have to have paper copies of everything, but it would be a good idea to have PDF's of the relevant items on a server that gets backed up on a routine basis.

Marshall