SafetyChain Blog

Managing suppliers effectively reduces risk, drives quality, and creates trusted relationships with customers. However, tracking data, compliance records, onboarding, audits, and more on paper can lead to inefficient decision-making and poor quality outcomes. Businesses that utilize paper and follow-up with emails are wasting valuable time and resources managing suppliers that they could redirect in other, more productive ways. Developing a secure supplier portal can help organizations create opportunities for improving accuracy, strengthening supplier relationships, and making real-time decisions all while ensuring that their supplier information remains uncompromised. 

Supplier compliance is critical to reducing risk, ensuring quality, and meeting customer expectations, but the activities involved can be tedious and time-consuming. Establishing the right relationship with clear expectations between all parties and open communication can significantly reduce supply challenges. Supplier management software is a beneficial tool that can efficiently organize all aspects of supplier management, creating opportunities for more productive relationships and allowing supply managers to invest their time in adding greater value to organizational processes.

The majority of process, discrete and repetitive manufacturers have between 100 and 500 suppliers, according to a recent poll by SafetyChain. Managing hundreds of vendors is an enormous undertaking, but the quality and safety of your product depend on your company’s ability to do it well. If you’re using paper, spreadsheets, or siloed point solutions to manage your suppliers, there’s simply no way you’re able to proactively track their performance and address issues promptly.

Fortunately, SafetyChain’s Supplier Manager solution provides a cloud-based, centralized solution that makes supplier compliance faster, easier, and more effective. Below, we’ll take you through the core steps of effective supplier management and how you can achieve each with SafetyChain.

What Is GFSI?

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is an organization whose purpose is to enforce food safety through internationally-recognized benchmarked standards. Becoming GFSI certified helps food manufacturers and processors stay competitive, produce safer products, and improve performance in a number of key areas. If your company is considering certification in one of the GFSI schemes, this guide will help you determine which option is best for your needs.

Oftentimes the supply chain is perceived as a linear relationship among suppliers and customers, but supplier management can be much more complicated. In reality, however, it is more like a web. Although there may be visibility into your tier 1 suppliers, visibility at tier 2 is often lacking. As you trace back and visibility decreases, you must identify which risks are most significant. Some risks may have a small potential impact on your company’s food safety, for instance, while the impact of others could be massive. Certain ingredients may only affect a few products, while others may affect many.

To some extent, the effectiveness of your supply chain management lies in your ability to collaborate seamlessly with suppliers. You must also ensure that teamwork is achieved within your own facility. Here, we explore some best practices your company can follow to support collaborative food supplier management.

At every level of the supply chain, food and beverage companies face increasing complexity which is why many process manufacturers are relying on software to help with supplier management compliance. While the key drivers for this added complexity vary, many companies share a demand for innovation, including new flavors, new products, and exciting ingredients. There are also new threats to food, including the appearance of new microbes and instances of bacteria such as E. coli emerging in previously unsuspected products and ingredients. These complexities are in part what led the FDA to recognize the supply chain as a major risk, and the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was developed as a result.

Building a foundation for any effective supplier compliance system lies in your company’s ability to identify its supply chain risks. Yet, in the food and beverage industry, not all suppliers present equal risks. One of the easiest ways to ensure you are managing supplier risks is to start at the root by ensuring you are onboarding your supplier correctly. However, for suppliers that have already been onboarded, you should differentiate among the risks? You should be dedicating your resources to the areas of greatest risk, but in order to do that, you must first determine which are most significant.

In 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was signed into law by President Obama. It was the most sweeping reform of food safety laws in more than 70 years, with the aim of shifting the focus from responding to food contamination events to actively preventing them.

In recent decades, terrorism has taken on a new identity. Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, terrorists have found new ways to threaten and harm the U.S. population. A September 2017 Newsweek article stated that ISIS supporters called for the poisoning of food in grocery stores across the U.S. and Europe. While the claim was not substantiated, it cannot be ignored. The food and beverage industry must do its part in taking a proactive role against threats and maintaining food safety throughout the nation.