Introducing the new Supplier Quality Management Solution

One of the most significant issues facing the global food industry today is the difficulty of gaining full visibility over the supply chain from which they source raw materials and services.

With increasing legal, regulatory, and commercial requirements emerging in recent years, this trend is likely to continue to grow.

Already, 85% of companies operating a global supply chain have experienced at least one supply chain disruption in the last 12 months according to a recent survey by SGS.

The recent introduction of new legislation such as FSMA and revisions to global food safety standards now require food businesses to individually assess each material, ingredient, supplier, agent, broker, and manufacturing facility.

These changes have very quickly increased the level of work required by effectively enforcing businesses to have near instant identification of each of their supply channels and detailed intelligence about its status.

The end result of this is that now the majority of food businesses struggle globally with managing their supply chain and the necessity to collect information and data.

The key challenge centers around the collection, collation, assessment and management of the volumes of data that need to be sourced from suppliers and this can include collaborating with suppliers to attain specifications, certificates, statements, plans and records, to name just a few, as well as conducting effective risk assessments, determining control measures and making decisions.

The current manual and semi-manual methods employed by most companies increasingly fail food businesses in their attempts to meet their requirements.

This problem only magnifies in severity when you consider that all this needs to be repeated in a one to two-year cycle.

To meet these increased obligations, Safefood 360° are proud to introduce a new way for users to manage their suppliers and answer each of these unique challenges while streamlining the time and resources spent on their daily supplier tasks.

What is new in the Supplier Quality Management

The new Supplier Quality Management solution is a standalone solution that exists in parallel to the Food Safety Management System and introduces major updates to Safefood 360° in respect of the core areas of Supplier Management which can now be conducted within the application to the most extreme rigors of international legislation, retailer and internal technical standards. These are:

• Supplier Dashboards: All pertinent supplier information is presented in easy to digest dashlets which allow an immediate understanding of the current state of supplier compliance, associated risk and all other relevant information.
• Supplier Auditing: A world-class audit feature which can be used by your auditors to conduct supplier on-site audits.
• Supplier Portal: Improving Supplier Collaboration and Communication, the Supplier Portal allows for comprehensive full assessment and decision making to be conducted more efficiently while managing supplier audits, corrective actions, complaints, notifications, recalls and incidents.
• Supplier Assessment (Pre & Full Assessment): Powerful and fully configurable pre and full assessment workflows allow you to efficiently risk assess all your supplier entities and determine their status for supply. Quick, risk-based decision making saves valuable time and resources across the business.
• Supply Chain Mapping & Intelligence: Visually map your supply chain in an instant and immediately drill down to the detail of each entity to see their current status including open or pending issues.
• Supplier Scorecards: Automatically generated and updated, scorecards give an instant picture of supplier status and any compliance gaps needing attention. These cards can be shared with your suppliers through the supplier portal ensuring everyone is always up to date.
• Performance Review: Monitor the performance of your supply chain in real time with out of the box Business Intelligence which comes equipped as standard with analytical dashboards for supplier, product and material entities. Automatic generation of performance reports saves you time and valuable resources as well.
• Governance Indicators: Automatically know if the supplier or material is originating from a high-risk country and the classification of that risk when conducting risk assessment or determining food defence. These Governance Indicators are regularly updated and sourced from the WHO so you always have the latest picture of what’s going on in your supplychain, and the global factors that may affect it.
• Alerts & Notifications: Stay alert and informed at all stages of the latest news in your supply chain. Specify at what level and to what extent automatic alerts and notifications are generated so that you can take immediate action at all stages of your global supply chain, all from the comfort of your desk.

Click here for more on the new functionalities of SQM.

What can I do as a user to prepare?

Each of the enhancements in Supplier Quality Management are now live in Safefood 360° and require no set up from users to benefit from.

A training and awareness program is already in place will be offered in a variety of channels that will best reach your specific needs. These are currently being rolled and include: 1) User Guide Update; 2) Instructional Video; 3) User Webinars; and 4 ) Dedicated Customer Induction Program if required.

As always, we welcome your feedback on all product updates or any other aspect of the product or service.

Equally, if you have any specific questions regarding this product update please do not hesitate to contact us by email ([email protected]), using the in-application query tool or by leaving a comment below.

I am not a user but would like to use Supplier Quality Management. How do I do this?

If you would like to know more about Supplier Quality Management or the Food Safety Management System please request a demo and we will have a Safefood 360 representative contact you for a personal demo of the solutions.