Tag Archives: supplier approval program

Randy Fields, Repositrak
FST Soapbox

How Your Approved Supplier Program Can Reduce Your Risk

By Randy Fields
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Randy Fields, Repositrak

Editor’s note:
Randy Fields, Chairman & CEO of Park City Group and CEO of ReposiTrak, will be featured in the keynote panel on the past, present and future of food safety journey at the upcoming Food Safety Consortium November 29, 2017 in Schaumburg, Il. He will discuss how to leverage technology and an approved supplier program to reduce a company’s risk. Here’s a preview of some of that content.

Everyone in the extended food supply chain, from ingredient and packaging suppliers through manufacturers and ultimately to the retailers or foodservice operators work hard to ensure the safety of the consumer. It’s why they’re in business. These companies also work to understand the various risks inherent in the supply chain and deploy comprehensive and repeatable processes designed to reduce the potential impact of those issues.

Selecting suppliers has inherent risks, so a comprehensive process is needed to mitigate any threats. Without properly vetting potential suppliers, companies may encounter existential challenges without the right tools needed to survive.

One of the most important areas for this risk mitigation is the approved supplier program which helps to ensure product quality standards are met. These programs are also required under the Preventive Controls portion of the Food Safety Modernization Act.

A best-in-class supplier approval process includes certifying suppliers, monitoring external and internal risk levers, continual and repetitive analysis to determine how programs are affecting the business and mitigating risk by planning for potential disruptions. It needs to be proactive and predictive to address the ever-changing consumer and business environments.

A successful supplier approval program attempts to address every foreseeable risk concern, from product recalls to supply chain disruptions. It is typically based on a standardized checklist that includes a comprehensive list of questions to assess a supplier’s food safety and quality systems. Sample questions focus on items like food safety certificates, compliance documentation, quality assurance programs, HACCP plans and third-party audits.

Supplier and product risk assessment is a critical element of the supplier approval program. Companies need to examine hazards that could contaminate products or create issues related to allergies. The risk assessment is usually a scorecard that establishes a series of levels and a baseline under which a supplier is not acceptable.

To ensure accuracy and consistency throughout the onboarding and subsequent procurement processes, companies should have a single repository of supplier information. Having a centrally located database of supplier information and required documentation will not only increase efficiency, it can help maintain compliance and give your organization the visibility it needs to take action. This database should include details on the approved primary suppliers and any potential risks associated with the supplier or its products. The system should have a process to conduct ongoing monitoring of suppliers to ensure that agreed upon standards are maintained.

Once the supplier approval program is up and running, it needs to be monitored constantly or the risks companies are trying to mitigate will return. Managing risk is not a one-time event., nor is managing supplier information. Implementing a process where established suppliers will update their information annually will help ensure companies are working with the most current information.

The bottom line is that a company’s reputation may be tarnished if there is a product recall or worse. Ensuring approved procedures and processes are followed every time a new supplier or product is considered will greatly help to mitigate the risks involved.

Approved

Finding Compliant Suppliers May Be Getting Easier

By Maria Fontanazza
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Approved

Six years ago, following FSMA being signed into law, Associated Wholesale Grocers, Inc. (AWG) knew it had to implement a supplier approval program to comply with the Preventive Controls rule. At the time, it had a manual process for managing the records of its 3000+ suppliers. The company needed an effective place, accessible any day of the year (and at any time), to collect and store all of its corporate and food safety documentation.

“I come from a manufacturing program where I was used to having a very robust supplier approval program,” says Shelly Stegner, director of food safety for AWG, a grocery co-op. “But in distribution companies such as AWG, food safety hasn’t necessarily been the culture, because we don’t do any reprocessing or repacking, or touch the product. When we had to comply with [FSMA], it was a whole new thing for AWG, and we knew we had to roll something out.”

AWG spent about two-and-a-half years looking for a company that could help not only manage documentation but could also give them control over the documents from a visibility perspective. After conducting thorough research, AWG selected Repositrak Inc.’s cloud-based Compliance Management solution. The product was recently launched to help companies during the sourcing process, assisting them with supplier qualification, order negotiation and on-boarding a new supplier. The solution also highlights compliant vendors based on business and safety requirements.

Food Safety Tech: What are the advantages and drawbacks to using an automated solution like Repositrak?

Shelly Stegner: It’s an easy way to keep track and retain all the records that you’ve never been able to retain before. And not only can you retain them, but there are also visual statistics behind the documents (which you don’t have when with hard copies). It’s not just having the documents—it’s actual usable data when you use [Repositrak] that helps drive efficiencies within our company, and it helps decrease our risk and liability with vendors—for example, we know that their certificate of insurance has expired, whereas before [using Repositrak], we didn’t know that.

The drawbacks are cost. Is it the cheapest option out there? No. But is it the most efficient option that we found? Yes. A lot of the companies may have been cheaper, but we would have had to hire an individual to do all the work. There is a cost associated with it, so [some] vendors are hesitant. The other drawback is that the industry overall has many different solutions, so if the supplier is not using Repositrak for their supplier approval program, it’s another point of entry. Maybe it only takes 30 minutes to do it, but it’s still something else that they have to do.

I think it’s becoming easier for vendors with Repositrak as we get more traction and as it becomes more of an industry-known [product]. Suppliers only have to upload documents once, and it automatically reaches all their customers. So for them, the more [suppliers] that are on one system, the easier it is for the whole industry.

FST: What are the challenges to implementing this type of system?

Stegner: For a company that was completely in the Stone Ages, we didn’t even have a list of all of our active vendors—so we thought we had 6000 active vendors, and we only had a little more than 3000. Just getting the information to Repositrak about active vendors and contacts proved to be the most difficult thing for us. Once we got Repositrak the key information, they ran with it.

FST: From time management perspective, what are the savings?

Stegner: Before we had nothing in place. Now, during my third-party audits or when FDA arrives, I can show them where we are in compliance when they ask about our supplier program. It saves me a ton of time in that regard.

Now when I have a recall, I can go into the system and look up a contact, versus waiting to get a contact from a category manager. If I need to issue a recall, I can see if [the vendors] have reviewed our recall program and issue it without waiting on that either.

As far as the time it takes to approve documents, there’s an increased time, but there’s also an awareness that we never had before. So not only are we collecting the documents, but now we are building a whole food safety culture that also has a new awareness and understanding of what it means to distribute safe food.

FST: What are the general challenges you see companies facing, especially in the area of compliance and having visibility throughout their supply chain?

Stegner: I think there’s a challenge with some companies on keeping information confidential because they simply don’t want to share information.

As far as traceability goes, our company is challenged with technology. [There’s] the financial need of upgrading our technology to have the true traceability that has so increasingly become required by consumers from farm to fork. A great deal of technology is needed to understand that in real time.

The farmer has their traceability, and the supplier has their traceability, we have ours, and then there’s the retailer—it’s tying all those together that proves to be a bit of challenge.