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Coronavirus Pandemic Turns U.S. Food and Beverage Supply Chains on Their Heads

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Coronavirus Pandemic Turns U.S. Food and Beverage Supply Chains on Their Heads

Coronavirus Pandemic Turns U.S. Food and Beverage Supply Chains on Their Heads

Current U.S. food supply chains are facing a severe emergency due to the current health situation, so how can these companies meet crisis-level fulfillment goals while avoiding introducing pathogens into an already stressed food supply chain?

Food and Beverage Supply Chains

Our current coronavirus-world has turned food and beverage supply chains on their heads, highlighting the importance of supply chain visibility and meeting U.S. FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) guidance.

FSMA aims to prevent and mitigate food-borne illnesses, which, according to the FDA website, under “normal” conditions, sicken about 48 million Americans annually – a significant public health burden.

But current U.S. food supply chains are facing a severe emergency due to the current health situation – store closings, social distancing, self-isolation, and panic grocery buying.

Food and beverage manufacturers are scrambling to fulfill orders.

How can these companies meet crisis-level fulfillment goals while avoiding introducing pathogens into an already stressed food supply chain?

FMSA Guidelines for Short- and Long-Term Food Safety

If your company is responsible for manufacturing, processing, packing, transporting or storing raw or finished food products or beverages and must comply with food-borne pathogen reduction requirements, consider the following steps.

They’ll ensure your customers receive non-damaged, top-quality foods:

  1. Familiarize or refamiliarize your personnel with existing FSMA guidelines that define safe food management criteria.
  2. Explore the recent FSMA draft guidance, “Mitigation Strategies to Protect Food Against Intentional Adulteration: Guidance for Industry” to ensure your food materials remain in compliance with government guidance. This newest guidance covers necessary written actions, training, procedures, and steps to take if mitigation strategies have been incorrectly implemented–including corrective steps to identify and correct a problem that has occurred and measures to reduce its recurrence. Corrective actions must be documented and are subject to verification.
  3. Employ tools that ensure you bypass common food contamination problems by providing overarching supply chain visibility and optimal shipping and handling decisions, so you can deliver the highest-quality food products as soon as possible while remaining compliant.

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What Are the Benefits of Supplier Quality Audits?

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What Are the Benefits of Supplier Quality Audits?

What Are the Benefits of Supplier Quality Audits?

While you want to trust and count on your suppliers, do you really know for sure that they have the proper procedures in place, that the procedures are being actively applied, and that their employees follow their established procedures?

Supplier quality audits are the process of verifying that each of your suppliers is adhering to both industry standards as set by the law and independent organizations, as well as your own company and brand standards.

Audits are widely recognized as a pertinent part of doing business.

While there are many reasons for this practice, here are the six biggest benefits of performing supplier quality audits.

1. A Reduction of Risk

A significant amount of risk accompanies extended supply chains, outsourcing, and globalization. The risks include:

  1. Quality
  2. Safety
  3. Business Continuity
  4. Reputation
  5. Cost Volatility
  6. Supply Disruption
  7. Non-Compliance Fines
  8. Safety Incidents
  9. And More

2. Better Contractor Management and Business Relationships with Suppliers

Your business can gain ground when costs are reduced, contractor management is streamlined, brand reputation is protected, and long-term profitability is achieved. This is easier done when the following tasks are taken care of efficiently:

  1. Supplier Prequalification
  2. Supplier Audits
  3. Worker Management
  4. Insurance Monitoring
  5. Analytics

3. Expert Guidance on Safety and Sustainability Performance

While you already have strategies in place to manage the health, safety, and behaviors within your own organization, how do you know your suppliers, contractors, and vendors are similarly motivated?

Supplier quality audits actively foster an aligned culture of health and safety through:

  1. Contractor Prequalification
  2. Document Management
  3. Auditing
  4. Employee-Level Qualification and Training
  5. Insurance Verification
  6. Business Intelligence

4. Closer Alignment with Your Compliance Standards

Your business is under pressure to maintain compliance with:

  1. Country-specific regulations
  2. Industry standards and regulations
  3. Corporate policies and standards

5. Better Procurement Decisions

Procurement teams are under a lot of pressure to find, qualify, monitor, and manage suppliers, all while lowering the cost of doing so. With supplier quality auditing, procurement managers can make better and more cost-effective procurement decisions by:

  1. Mitigating risk through communication, evaluation, selection, and monitoring services.
  2. Gaining unprecedented visibility into safety statistics, risk profiles, and historical data.
  3. Reducing lead time and improving efficiency with ongoing guidance and support throughout the procurement process.
  4. Maximizing data quality on the entire supply chain.

6. Sustainable Business Practices

Today, an organization committed to improving the environment through sustainable growth is required to meet both regulatory requirements and societal expectations. Managing the long-term value of your company and its brand is party dependent on properly managing the environmental, social, financial, and economic impacts throughout its supply chain. All of this can be done more easily with thorough supplier quality audits.

Read more at What Are the Benefits of Supplier Quality Audits?

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10 ways big data is revolutionising supply chain management

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Big data is providing supplier networks with greater data accuracy, clarity, and insights, leading to more contextual intelligence shared across supply chains.

Forward-thinking manufacturers are orchestrating 80% or more of their supplier network activity outside their four walls, using big data and cloud-based technologies to get beyond the constraints of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems. For manufacturers whose business models are based on rapid product lifecycles and speed, legacy ERP systems are a bottleneck. Designed for delivering order, shipment and transactional data, these systems aren’t capable of scaling to meet the challenges supply chains face today.

Choosing to compete on accuracy, speed and quality forces supplier networks to get to a level of contextual intelligence not possible with legacy ERP and SCM systems. While many companies today haven’t yet adopted big data into their supply chain operations, these ten factors taken together will be the catalyst that get many moving on their journey.

The ten ways big data is revolutionising supply chain management include:

  1. The scale, scope and depth of data supply chains are generating today is accelerating, providing ample data sets to drive contextual intelligence.
  2. Enabling more complex supplier networks that focus on knowledge sharing and collaboration as the value-add over just completing transactions.
  3. Big data and advanced analytics are being integrated into optimisation tools, demand forecasting, integrated business planning and supplier collaboration & risk analytics at a quickening pace.
  4. Big data and advanced analytics are being integrated into optimisation tools, demand forecasting, integrated business planning and supplier collaboration & risk analytics at a quickening pace.
  5. Using geoanalytics based on big data to merge and optimise delivery networks.
  6. Big data is having an impact on organizations’ reaction time to supply chain issues (41%), increased supply chain efficiency of 10% or greater (36%), and greater integration across the supply chain (36%).
  7. Embedding big data analytics in operations leads to a 4.25x improvement in order-to-cycle delivery times, and a 2.6x improvement in supply chain efficiency of 10% or greater.
  8. Greater contextual intelligence of how supply chain tactics, strategies and operations are influencing financial objectives.
  9. Traceability and recalls are by nature data-intensive, making big data’s contribution potentially significant.
  10. Increasing supplier quality from supplier audit to inbound inspection and final assembly with big data.

Read more at 10 ways big data is revolutionising supply chain management

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