Tag Archives: Cloud

Unleashing the power of the cloud on Food Safety and Food Quality

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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SafetyChain’s FSQA Tech Talk conversation continues next week with a discussion on why cloud and mobile technologies are becoming a game changer for food safety and quality assurance (FSQA).

As part of an ongoing series that focuses on how technology is being leveraged to solve FSQA execution challenges, the next FSQA Tech Talk session’s special guest speaker will be Michele Eddy, Corporate QA Manager with UniSea.  Eddy will be sharing her experience and insight as to how realtime FSQA data, which is  available, anywhere, and at anytime, is helping to provide sales with immediate quality gradings, better manage HACCP, CAPA, and direct observations for UniSea’s pillars of sanitation,  and how the cloud is making it easier for participants in their supply chain to work together.  Eddy will also discuss use and employee adoption of mobile devices.

The session will start with SafetyChain’s Director of Technical Solutions who will discuss key benefits of the cloud on FSQA, including the ability to have realtime data proactively pushed out and acted upon,  as well as how cloud and mobile devices support FSQA transparency and visibility across the value chain. Also discussed will be common cloud misperceptions including security and employee adoption.

The speakers will be taking questions live from the audience, and FSQA attendees are encouraged to bring their IT folks to participate. Attendees who would like to see what the cloud and mobile FSQA apps look like in action, are invited to stay online after the Tech Talk for a 15 minute demo of SafetyChain’s cloud and mobile solutions. The session is being held on Tuesday, May 19 at 10:00 am PDT, and those interested in attending can visit here for more information and to register.

The FSQA Tech Talks are a part of SafetyChain’s 2015 FSQA Technology Series: “Enabling Technologies – The Food Safety & Quality Assurance Game Changer” – which includes Leadership Forums, FSQA Tech Talks and Executive Briefs. Jill Bender, SafetyChain Vice President of Marketing Communications, said, “SafetyChain has been very proactive these past several years in educating industry on key FSQA challenges such as FSMA, GFSI, cost of quality and more. Input from the thousands of people who have attended our webinar forums was that they’d also like to learn more about how their peer companies are leveraging technology to execute on these challenges – and so the 2015 FSQA Technology Series was born!” “So far more than 1,500 hundred FSQA and food company IT folks have participated in the series, and we’re very excited to continue with fabulous speakers such as Michele Eddy,” Bender continued.

To learn more about SafetyChain’s FSQA Technology series visit www.safetychain.com/2015techseries.

Upcoming FSQA Tech Talks Include:
June 23: Harnessing Cost of Quality
July 21: Conquering HACCP, HARPC and Food Safety Plan Management
Participants of this series need only sign-up once and will automatically receive notice of the next topic and login/call information.  Register here for this complimentary series.

FST Soapbox

Hey You – Get On to My Cloud!

By Barbara Levin
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Adoption of cloud-based technologies for food safety and quality assurance: It’s going to happen. It has to happen. It should happen.

There’s been a lot of chat in the blogosphere recently about adoption of cloud-based technologies for food safety and quality assurance (FSQA). When it comes to uncertainty about the cloud, the Food and Beverage industry needs to – and I truly say this with no offense intended – get over it! It’s going to happen. It has to happen. It should happen.

  1. FSQA compliance is only going to get more complex – with testing and audit trails required by law, non-regulatory standards and by customers. This means that all participants in a supply chain are going to have to be connected to get information collected, analyzed and reported in realtime.
  2. It’s not practical, and probably not feasible – particularly in a global food supply chain – to connect participants using ERP-type solutions that are expensive, take a lot of time to deploy and many, many dollars to maintain. 
  3. Most emerging food safety and quality solutions are cloud-based for just that reason. They make it easy to connect suppliers, manufacturers and services/retail customers – without expensive hardware installations – and with affordable, fast to deploy and easy-to-use solutions that have actual hard-dollar return on investment.

So what’s the fuss?

Most concerns seem to be centered around security, so let’s consider some industries which represent the most prominent users of cloud solutions today. Two of the largest are banks, who heavily promote online banking including international cloud banking, and human resources departments of large companies, who rely on cloud-based employee portals for open enrollment, paystub viewing and more. We are talking about some of the most sensitive information out there: individuals’ personal information, social security numbers, salaries, bank accounts, etc. And cloud adoption is growing rapidly in other industries too – like insurance, healthcare and more.

Early cloud adopters in the F&B industry know what industries like banking and human resources know:

  1. There’s as much security in cloud-based solutions as there are in non-cloud technologies – and cloud security is highly configurable to fit the specific needs of individual users. If you want, for example, downstream customers to see only COAs and not see failed FSQA tests – then that’s how your vendor will configure your solution. If you want full transparency you can have that too. And for information that you don’t want anyone to see – like recipes – that is also a part of the security. 
  2. Cloud solution vendors generally exceed government and customer security requirements because they go the extra mile to ensure customer confidence and confidentiality.
  3. And as much as everyone thinks participants in a supply chain will balk about using a cloud system to send/receive FSQA information – the reality is that it makes it easier for everyone to work together – speeding throughput and preventing non-compliant products from coming in or going out. 

So I encourage you to talk to your vendors. Learn more about their cloud security. And, to paraphrase Mr. Jagger, Hey you – get on to my cloud!