28 replies to this topic

[Tony-C]

Odd choice of words in the standard. I think it could be reworded to better distinguish between suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, and distributors. "Suppliers" can have various meanings, but in our profession, it typically means the company that you purchase something from. In the case of consumable supplies (as opposed to ingredients or cleaning chemicals), they're usually sold in small quantities through a retailer or industrial supplier. If I ask Grainer, McMaster, Walmart, etc., they'll likely tell me to pound sand. And they would be right to do so based on the tiny fraction of their business my company represents, multiplied across the thousands (millions?) of products they stock.

 

BRCGS Glossary

'Supplier : The person, firm, company or other entity to which a site’s purchase order to supply is addressed.'

[GMO]

BRCGS Glossary

'Supplier : The person, firm, company or other entity to which a site’s purchase order to supply is addressed.'

 

 

I'm with Lost in the woods on this one though. For lubricants, I don't think they actually mean "supplier" or if they do, auditors aren't actually auditing that. As others have done, when getting lubricant SDS (or MSDS and TDS in the UK if not combined) not just once, but often I've had to go online or contact the manufacturer not the supplier and I've never had an auditor question if I got them from the supplier or not, just that they're available. I'm not saying it wouldn't be better practice if the supplier did do what they should, just pointing out it's not often the case and unless you're a big company you almost never buy directly from the manufacturer (even then you probably don't.)

[jfrey123]

I dunno about that GMO.  A reseller has a bit of an obligation to provide SDS and specifications for items they market.  I don't think I should have to go all the way to a manufacturer to get the information, as they're relying on managing a network of their distributors to service the millions of customers they might have.  If I'm buying sanitation chemicals from a company who tells me "Oh, we get your stuff from 5 different manufacturers, you need to go individually ask those manufacturers for SDS and spec/instruction sheets," I'm not going to have that sanitation supplier for very long...

[GMO]

I dunno about that GMO.  A reseller has a bit of an obligation to provide SDS and specifications for items they market.  I don't think I should have to go all the way to a manufacturer to get the information, as they're relying on managing a network of their distributors to service the millions of customers they might have.  If I'm buying sanitation chemicals from a company who tells me "Oh, we get your stuff from 5 different manufacturers, you need to go individually ask those manufacturers for SDS and spec/instruction sheets," I'm not going to have that sanitation supplier for very long...

 

It might be bad practice but it happens a lot in lubricant suppliers (not sanitation chemicals I agree). But that's probably because sanitation chemical suppliers are selling mostly to technical people. Lubricant suppliers are selling mostly to engineers.