Your food safety compliance system ensures every aspect of your supply chain is consistently satisfying program requirements. For many companies, the breadth of these requirements spans far and wide. In addition to supplier compliance, you must also manage additional requirements including food safety protocols such as HACCP, and regulatory standards like FSMA. Only the most capable system can support such complex needs.
Here the five pillars of an effective system for food safety and compliance:
1) Documentation
All of your program requirements, plans, processes, and operational data must be documented. Make information visible and easily accessible by using a centralized repository for all of your records.
2) Employee Training
An article in Quality Assurance Magazine explains how having written policies and procedures is just one aspect of compliance. Ensure employees understand their role in compliance by providing thorough training.
3) Supplier Compliance
The safety and quality of the products received by your suppliers is integral to supporting your facility’s compliance efforts. Prevent out-of-spec materials from being processed by automating your supplier compliance program with a solution that has tools like real-time data collection and notifications.
4) Tracking Performance
Maintaining compliance is an ongoing effort which demands continuous performance monitoring. Use analytics to assess which areas need improvement, including any specific processes or suppliers that are consistently falling short.
5) Continuous Improvement
Once you’ve identified your biggest risks, put plans in place to mitigate them. Then, use the data available to you to track performance, making sure that compliance efforts are improving on a continuous basis.
The simplest yet most effective way to achieve the visibility needed to support each of the pillars described above is using food safety compliance software. With real-time data collection, these solutions give you the power to see what’s going on at every level in your supply chain at any time. You’ll therefore catch issues earlier, identify performance trends, and ultimately make the best possible decisions to support compliance and the overall success of your business.
SafetyChain Software is a cloud-based food quality management system that reduces costs, waste, and risk for food companies. Our powerful FSQA platform gives quality and operations managers an easy-to-use tool to automate compliance, safety, and quality programs while providing valuable real-time data to help optimize operations.
