Safefood 360 Risk Assessment Feature Overview

Requirements

The various GFSI standards all require risk assessments to be conducted for HACCP and other aspects of your food safety management system. In particular, the latest revisions to these standards have dramatically increased the burden for food operations to risk assess their systems in terms of resources and frequency of certain programs. For example, the new BRC Issue 6 mentions risk assessment in no less than 13 places and these risk assessments must be documented.

The purpose of risk assessment is to determine the risk from specific hazards and from this apply your controls and resources to those areas that present the greatest risks to food safety. The logic follows that resources are not infinite and therefore there is a need to separate out significant and non-significant activities. The risk is usually estimated based on an assessment of the likelihood of occurrence by the adverse impact. In this regard the assessments required under the GFSI standards are qualitative in nature however when conducted allow you to focus your time, energy and resources on those areas that may yield the highest risk.

If we take a closer look at the new BRC Issue 6 standard, areas where risk assessments need to be conducted include:

• 3.4.4 - Risk Assessment (RA) for the frequency of inspection
• 3.5.1.1 - RA for each raw material or group of materials
• 4.5.1 - RA for water sampling points and frequency
• 4.10.6 - RA to minimise foreign body contamination of packaging containers
• 4.11.1 - RA for frequency and methods of cleaning
• 4.13.8 - RA for the frequency of in-depth pest control surveys
• 6.3.2 - RA frequency of checking measuring devices.

How does Safefood 360 meet these requirements?

Throughout the application you will find built into the workflow for setting up your programs or where events are being recorded a risk assessment tool which allows for risk assessments to be conducted and documented. We have referenced the GFSI and other standards to ensure all areas where risk assessments are required have this RA tool included.

Where appropriate the systems allows for a simple RA or an advanced RA where probability of occurrence and adverse impact can be estimated. These RA’s are automatically saved for review by your auditor. They can be easily revised and updated as new information comes to light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy08OxiBsXg

Dear George,

I noticed yr careful choice of terminologies however the net (BRC6) result for required evaluations seems to be substantially more than you are illustrating, at least in some viewpoints. I was tempted to say "ridiculously" more.

For example the recent post(s) - http://www.ifsqn.com...dpost__p__53164

The above further supports yr main message of course although I thought the use of a one-time, over-arching spreadsheet as illustrated in an earlier post on this forum looked quite neat also, albeit requiring external cross-references to actual data (assuming latter was necessary). (Simple is as Simple does ).

Rgds / Charles.C

Hi Charles,
I'm always conscious when members view videos it is important to get the message across is the least amount time possible. The illustrations are brief for that reason. I only show a sample of the areas where RA is required but the application provides for a RA in all the required areas. The benefit here is that user does not have to refer to a standard to know where RA is required.

The application provides two RA approaches i.e. simple and advanced depending on the area under question. For example Codex clearly states for HACCP the likelihood and impact should be considered and a scoring system similar to the recent post example is provided. For Corrective Action generation both simple and advance is offered.

I agree that a one spreadsheet catch all has significant benefits. But I'm sure this in the long term will not fully service the company's needs. For example 3.4.1 on auditing programs - it is not possible to RA programs in general. Each program needs to be assessed based on the activity. In addition the hazard identification could lead to a myriad of possibilities. Standard RA scoring models only really work for a specific hazard when identified. For this reason RA is conducted on a program by program basis and is qualitative. The application will provide a summary of all RA's so it is easy to read an access.

Thanks for the feedback Charles.

George