5 replies to this topic

[J.osh]

Hi all,

Big change of role for me. After spending 10 years as a Production Planner, I have (somehow!) just managed to step into the world of Quality :)

I am in the cardboard packaging industry, and follow the standards of BRCGS and ISO9001, both of which I have audits for in 2 month's time. There is no-one at my site with a background to these standards so I am having to learn everything from scratch, by myself. It is very daunting!

I'm grinding my way though a gap analysis at the moment, you might see a good few questions from me. But ultimately I'm striving for the highest grade for my site and want to do the best I can in my role. Looking forward to the guidance from you wonderful experts :)

[SQFconsultant]

Good afternoon J.osh! Welcome.

 

Well, I would say you got a full plate indeed.

 

2 months would be crunching time for an experienced person in ISO and BRC - I would highly suggest you speak with ownership/management and see if they will allow a consultant to come in and work with you - it will cut the curve greatly.  I know you got this, however a side helping of help never hurts.

[mgourley]

What Glenn said.

 

Marshall

[Tony-C]

Hi J.osh,

 

 

Welcome to the IFSQN forums

 

Sounds like you have a busy couple of months ahead of you. You will need to get up to speed very quickly with the requirements of both standards. If you don’t have the knowledge /experience then some training would be appropriate pdq, particularly if you are the main person responsible for hazard analysis and risk assessment (HARA) and leading the HARA team - BRCGS and/or the Management representative - ISO 9001.

 

Good luck,

 

Tony

[J.osh]

Thanks all, and nice to meet you :)

It certainly will be a mountain to climb to get up to speed. I am reaching out for help from more experienced members from sister sites, and luckily, a lot of my gap analysis is showing the correct things in place (so far!)

Its hard work right now, but I know I'll really enjoy this role. I've been flicking through the forums and I've already picked up on a lot of good information :)

Thanks

[HaloQA]

Hi J.osh!

 

I recognise this situation as I went through the same. I was indeed a production employee and started myself the quality team. When this happened, we had literally nothing in place. I was asked "customers request us all time to be BRC certified, can you make it possible?", I checked online what that was, found the standard and figure it out from there on.

 

I am not sure what is the status of your company, but it took me a proper year to set everything up and running. Luckily we were very small by then and implementing became easier in the sense of informing other employees their role within the new system. But building all from scratch with almost no knowledge was quite an adventure. Indeed I went as far as I could and then we hired a consultant to do a simulation audit. Based on what he found, we received from support from him and completed all the requirements. When we officially audited with a certification body we got AA.

I would highly recommend doing something like this (hiring an expert once you have everything moreover sorted out), as it saved us a lot of money. Otherwise we would have gotten too much non-conformities (possibly not even certification).

 

I wish you the best with it :) Definitely, this website also helped a lot (webinars and reading on topics).