Food Safety Auditing

What is important to you?

When deciding on the need for performing a second-party audit on your suppliers, you need to ask the following questions:

• “What is important for us to check?”
• Do we have a specific requirement that is very important, above and beyond the general requirements of the food safety standard your business is working too?

One common example of this could be the method of dealing with nonconforming issues. Does your supplier notify you as a customer when process outputs are nonconforming? If you are finding issues with a supplier on a regular basis , then a second-party audit of the suppliers process would be beneficial.

It is also important to remember that you do not need to implement second-party audits on every supplier in your supply chain. If you have some suppliers that only deliver low risk, low volume products to you, these suppliers might not need the surveillance that is required of the suppliers that provide you with higher risk, higher volume raw materials. It is for these critical suppliers that you may want to check the implementation of their crucial processes.

This can be exceptionally important when you are making assessments of suppliers at critical points in the supply chain. When you are first approving a supplier a site audit of key processes is helpful.

By creating your audit checklist it will help you focus on the process elements that are of interest to you, the audit can be much more useful than just repeating what the certification body auditors have already done. Food Safety Consultants can facilitate your business greatly in this area. Ciaron White has extensive experience conducting audits for both secondary manufacturing sites and Irelands leading retailers.

Second-party audits can improve your supply chain

Is the strategy of removing second-party audits from your supply chain management strategy the right approach? In truth, only you can decide.

However, if you have specific requirements that need certain food safey and quality processes to be implemented a certain way, such as your own bespoke requirements, then you might find it very useful to perform periodic, specific audits of these certain processes at your suppliers sites. Likewise, if you have key suppliers whose processes are of utmost importance, then auditing critical processes may be necessary for you.

The criteria as to whether or not to perform an audits on a suppliers, must be based on sound logic and a risk based approach. Make the supplier audit decisions that make sense for your business, and that will make your supply chain better.

If you require IRCA registered Lead auditors to audit your suppliers do not hesitate to contact us.