What is Food Safety Management Software (FSMS)?
What is a food safety management system or software (FSMS)? According to the regulation(EC) No 852/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 Apr 2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs, Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plans are established and required for the food business. (extended reading: What is HACCP, and how can we build a better HACCP plan?)
Food safety management systems (FSMS) are systematic methods for controlling risks to the safety of food products within a food manufacturing plant, helping ensure that the products produced are safe for consumers. Food safety management software provides a more cost-efficient, time-saving and traceable option to enhance food safety standards across the industry.
Food safety compliance software is the management system capable of managing food safety by reviewing the physical, biological, and chemical hazards of the procurement, manufacturing, and handling of raw materials. Food businesses should produce food according to the systematic approach to the identification, evaluation, and control of food safety hazards (HACCP, subcategory: Dairy Grade A Voluntary HACCP, Juice HACCP, Retail & Food Service HACCP, Seafood HACCP) to ensure the food quality and food safety for preventing potential foodborne illness, to provide a systematic approach to controlling food safety hazards in your food business and to ensure the food safety standard complies with the most global food safety standards.
- What is Food Safety Management Software (FSMS)?
- How does a Food Safety Management Software (FSMS) work?
- Seven principles of HACCP
- How does Food Safety Management Software help food companies?
- What are the benefits to Enterprise Companies when adopting Food Safety Management Software?
- What are the benefits to Small and Medium Companies when adopting Food Safety Management Software?
- Should my food business get a Food Safety Management Software (FSMS)?
How does a Food Safety Management Software (FSMS) work?
Food safety management systems follow a series of procedures that define the steps that food business operators should take to maintain quality control and comply with international standards and regulations established by state and federal governments. A Food Safety Management System (FSMS) is a controlled process to handle food safety, ensuring all food products produced meet quality standards and are safe for consumption. Through several specifications and procedures, a food safety management system will ensure that the end product delivered to consumers is safe to eat and does not contain any health hazards.
In simple terms, Food Safety Management Systems (FSMS) are programs explicitly established by manufacturers to make sure operators in the food and beverage industries produce products that are safe for human consumption.
Seven Principles of HACCP
- Conducting hazard analysis
- Determining the critical control points (CCP)
- Establishing critical limits (CL)
- Establishing monitor procedure to control the CCP’s
- Taking corrective action when CCP is not under controlled
- Verifying the procedures for operations
- Retaining documentation for tracing back if the HACCP is working effectively
There are various food business types, and each business has its own CCP, which requires the FSMS to be built by industry insiders to provide the best practice for daily operations and ensure the highest food safety standard is achievable.
Basic FSMS may provide your business with a set of instructions from templates, allowing you to upload according to the instructions. Being an advanced FSMS across the food safety industry, Safefood 360° does not just provide you with a folder of generic documents and the professional service to set up the best practice for your business.
A group of experienced food experts designed an ultimate solution dedicated to the food industry to provide streamlined systems, insightful solutions, and integrated dashboards for improving food business operation efficiencies. In 2010, the Safefood 360° Food Safety Management Software (also named Food Safety management plan, one of the thirty-five preset modules) was launched and used by the food manufacturers.
Beneficial Food Safety Management Software can provide regulatory compliance with ISO standards while aggressively controlling risks and hazards during food production. With food safety software acting as a quality management system tailored for the food industry, companies can meet compliance requirements established by various global governmental agencies.
How does Food Safety Management Software help food companies?
A food safety management system makes it far more likely to detect physical, chemical, or biological hazards early, mitigating physical effects and associated risks. Through several specifications and procedures, food safety management systems ensure the end product, when it arrives at a consumer, is safe to eat and does not contain any health hazards. If the system is paper-based, it is significant to work to maintain the HACCP principles. Many issues often arise during its application, and paperwork is one of the biggest challenges, as well as inaccurate information.
Time-saving:
According to the study about the effectiveness of Food Safety Management Software in December 2019, a proper FSMS can cut business operator’s workload by at least 50%. With the correct Food Safety Management System, food companies can ensure that their customers are purchasing a high-quality, safe food product that has passed a series of food safety procedures and follows the best practices on food handling. With fewer recalls or safety violations, your customers will increasingly trust your brand for providing quality products in the food and beverage industry.
Quality assured:
According to the independent study carried out in 2021 by the University of Birkbeck and a report from BRCGS, food businesses with certification to third-party food safety standards are substantially less likely to experience an intervention than those without certification. Using FSMS to manipulate the food safety procedures can reduce the fault from human error and provide realistic and reliable data for auditing.
Making audits easier:
Everything that interacted with the FSMS will be stored on the cloud, including the activity logs, the documents submitted, and the procedures taken will be saved automatically. Being audited to different standards, organisations would be difficult to navigate without a FSMS, especially with varying requirements from other standards. Using the coherent system ensures the documents are aligned and traceable when you are being audited.
What are the benefits for Enterprise Companies when adopting Food Safety Management Software?
To run a global food business, you should invest in a world-class Food Safety Management System.
Typical challenges for Enterprise food businesses are:
Increasing Costs: Maintaining a global Food Safety Management System on paper, such as Excel, and other inefficient software platforms can cost you millions in unnecessary overheads and product failures every year. Safefood 360° allows you to concentrate all site, business unit and group systems into one common platform resulting in significant savings.
Fragmented Local Systems: A common challenge of large enterprise food businesses is the lack of standardisation across their food safety systems in local plants. Projects attempting to address this through standard software solutions typically fail. Safefood 360° is a proven web-based solution that makes it easy for business groups to roll out systems, workflows and best practices corporate-wide quickly. The system can be deployed globally and managed centrally.
Lots of data – but no oversight:
Enterprise food businesses, by their nature, generate significant amounts of data which need to be managed. Much of this data is used for compliance, but its value in business process oversight and improvement is seldom realised. Safefood 360° provides a platform that allows you to manage the compliance data and drive improvement based on solid reporting.
Safefood 360° can help you standardise the Enterprises’ ERP systems and processes across the business group with multiple languages supported. The reports and alerts modules help you automate and streamline reporting and create automatic alerts; With a dedicated professional services team’s guidance, we help enterprises build a better culture toward better food safety.
What are the benefits for Small and Medium Enterprise Companies when adopting Food Safety Management Software?
As an SME in food manufacturing, Safefood 360° is the only food safety management software you’ll ever have to invest in. Typical challenges of small & medium food businesses come from:
Maintaining Compliance – getting certified and maintaining standards requires a large effort from your team. Safefood 360° brings all your systems together in one package making compliance faster, cheaper and more accessible.
Lack of resources – large companies can buy their way out of problems by hiring consultants, lawyers and managers. Safefood 360° makes it easier for small and medium businesses to maintain the Food Safety Management System without spending on new hires.
Not enough time – Lean management teams typically need to wear several hats leaving limited time to stay on top of and complete day-to-day compliance tasks. By automating many of these tasks, Safefood 360° allows managers to get the job done efficiently and free them up to run the business.
When adopting Safefood 360°, our compliance modules will help you become and remain compliant against retailer technical standards, third-party certifications and local legislation. The software has been developed from the ground up to meet and exceed these requirements. When your company grows, you don’t want your systems and compliance requirements to become the limiting factor. Our software will help you expand faster by making food safety and quality management a problem of the past. The team behind Safefood 360° consists of experienced quality managers, auditors, trainers and university lecturers. By becoming a Safefood 360° user, you can tap into the years of experience through the product.
Should my food business get a Food Safety Management Software (FSMS)?
In simple summary – yes – if you want to secure and scale your food business. The most efficient way to ensure consumers receive safe and reliable food products is by adopting the required practices and technologies throughout food supply chains and manufacturing facilities – difficult to be documented well when using paper-based systems. Not only must the essential safety standards be met, but it is also essential for consumers to receive the highest-quality food products. By ensuring quality compliance and safety standards are met at every step of the supply chain, you can be assured that you are providing the best products to customers.
Compliance software helps build a successful food supply chain system within the food industry. It is safe to say software will help food companies ensure consumers are eating safe food items and meats. Fortunately, safety modernisation opportunities are available to food-industry businesses, from real-time risk analytics to business intelligence tools. With food safety management software, you can keep up to date on daily operations and better prepare for pending health inspections with no stress. An excellent management system will allow you and
Safefood 360° is an innovative software designed by food experts, and it is dedicated to food manufacturers to work for a safer world. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest food safety news. If you would like to have more details about how to ensure the food safety of your company, submit a demo request here.
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