Why your company should master third-party audits

— ADVERTORIAL —

The food processing industry has rapidly adopted new technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance food safety. Knitting them together to develop the kind of efficiencies promised by ‘new tech’ has been a growing problem, however.

To meet growing demand, most food processors, especially meat packers and processors, have been implementing sophisticated traceability systems so consumers can trace origin and processing. Poultry processors are feeling similar market pressure. Add in the complexities caused as the Internet of Things (IoT) moves deeper into food plants and the problem of mastering it all can be daunting. These new technologies along with the requirements established by governmental and third-party auditing have made it extremely difficult to gather the data needed to improve in plant operations or complete an audit.

If you’re considering a third-party audit to help improve your food safety practices, consider this: “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.” If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. 

Peter Drucker, called by BusinessWeek the man who invented management, distilled it into “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” 

In other words, no matter how good your food safety programs are, you will inevitably have to make them better. You can’t do that if you don’t have adequate measurement data. With more than half a dozen recognized standards that can serve as goals, it is difficult to ensure your standards can meet or exceed the minimums set by:

1. FSSC 22000
2. IFS
3. ISO
4. HACCP
5. GMP
6. BRCGS
7. Federal, state and local governments

In the highly regulated industry of food manufacturing, compliance with local, national, and international standards is a matter of business survival. Internal audits are the only effective way to ensure that a facility and its processes align with often complicated regulatory requirements, lower the risk of financial penalties, and reduce the chance of costly legal issues.

AIB TALKS ABOUT HOW TO FORM AN INTERNAL AUDIT TEAM

The first step is the formation and training of a food safety team charged with conducting an internal audit suggests AIB International. Each team member must know the audit process and be familiar with how to maintain records and internal procedures. They will be charged with detecting and mitigating risks and identifying noncomformances. 

AIB insists a schedule of continuous education will keep your internal audit team up-to-date with the latest food safety regulations and trends. A regularly scheduled internal audit is the basis of any food safety audit plan. It guarantees audits are conducted on time and consistently throughout the year and provides an opportunity for your team to define the scope of every food safety audit.

The frequency of your internal audits should develop continuous improvement opportunities. If a particular process has more issues, for instance, you’ll want to boost the frequency of internal audits. Auditing problem areas where you’ve implemented corrective action ensures your leadership team has successfully addressed non-conformances. 

AIB says you should always manage an internal audit as an independent program with its own procedures, cross-department representation, and analysis reporting.

Here are some steps suggested by AIB to help formalize an internal auditing process:

• Prepare a comprehensive checklist that includes facility-specific questions.
• Details, details, details! Document with detailed descriptions and photographic evidence for evaluations against standard requirements. Do not have auditors simply check off a “complies” or “does not comply” box.
• Complete a non-conformity report, which should include deadlines and assigned responsibilities for conducting root cause analysis and developing corrective action plans.
• Schedule a post-audit findings meeting with appropriate department managers to discuss corrective actions taken and completed.

HOW DOES INTERNAL AUDITING SAFEGUARD THE COMPANY?

Well-developed and regularly scheduled internal audits allow your company to take corrective actions before problems occur, protecting your company from recalls, and the financial and brand damage caused by unsafe practices. 

Internal audits add value by identifying areas for improvement and cost savings. They allow food manufacturers to identify gaps in their processes and systems before they cause expensive product recalls or disastrous lawsuits.

Compliance with recognized governmental standards is an important reason for internal auditing in food manufacturing. With proper execution of internal audits, food manufacturers can also identify areas for improvement that deliver financial gains while enhancing overall operational efficiencies.

HOW THE SAFE FOOD ALLIANCE DEFINES THE PROCESS

The Safe Food Alliance (SFA) agrees with the AIB guidelines. SFA defines “The internal auditor’s main goal is to verify and provide supporting evidence that the program audited either complies with or does not comply with the established standards.” 

A successful internal audit should confirm that the plant is meeting the planned and established standard. Once the Internal Audit has been concluded; the auditor will conduct a meeting with the appropriate department staff, confirm the scope or area covered during the audit, read out non-conformities, assign responsibility, and agree to corrective actions with deadlines.

SFA says there are many challenges facilities face when conducting internal audits and published some steps to help overcome those challenges.

• Develop Internal Audit Program objectives with Senior Management to include reducing non-conforming product, promoting continuous improvement, passing the GFSI Audit, and meeting customer and regulatory specifications.
• Manage internal audits as a separate program that includes procedures, trending analysis, formal training, and cross-department representation.
• Ensure the internal audit is an official event and do not let other work interfere with audit completion or reporting. 
• Ensure internal auditors are objective and only collect evidence or facts. 
• Do not interfere with production activities. Take pictures for training purposes and reduce audit bias by having a cross-function internal audit team.
• Train internal auditors to properly communicate by asking open-ended questions. 
• Internal Auditors must always remember to audit the system and not the person.

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO MANAGE INTERNAL AUDITS?

A problem faced by small- to medium-sized producers is the reliance on simple ‘home-brewed’ solutions such as Excel spreadsheets which fall far short of capturing the scope and complexities of modern food safety standards. As an auditing resource, those solutions are wholly inadequate and call for much more reliable data delivered quickly to your entire food safety team, especially when considering third-party audits.

To help effectively manage internal audits, food processing plants are turning to SaaS-based software management tools for better, more reliable data. SaaS is an acronym that stands for ‘Software as aService’ and describes any software that isn’t run at your premises, never resides on a local machine, and is a full-blown app on its own. It is cloud-based and tamper-proof. 

SaaS software is deployed almost immediately. Unlike traditional software, which is sold as a perpetual license with an up-front cost and an optional ongoing support fee, SaaS providers usually ask for a subscription fee. The initial setup cost is typically lower than the equivalent enterprise software. 

According to user reports, using a secure SaaS software solution has proven to produce consistently accurate audit and compliance reporting. It can measure supplier quality, improve food safety, tie your supply chain into a cohesive unit, and provide a coordinating point for the electronic measuring devices used in your plant. 

Sillas Larsen, SEO/SEM Content Specialist, FOSS Software Services, listed a few of the advantages of using advanced SaaS software. “The aggregated data offers immediate system-wide accessibility and allows information to be accessed from any location. The software management tools give the user quick transformation of food safety and quality control records into accurate, usable data. Management can use the information to improve food safety practices, business decisions, operational performance, and profitability.”

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