1. Senior management commitment
Managing customer standards
Managing customer standards in addition to your certification standard isn't easy. in this article we look at how to do this.
Introduction
If you supply customer branded product, you’ll know that customers have their own standards that you must comply with – as part of doing business with them. In this article, we’ll look at what the requirements for managing customers are, plus the two most popular ways of managing multiple standards.
The standards
This article regarding customer standards is written to meet the following sections of the standards:
| BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9 | No specific clauses (customer focus was removed) |
| BRCGS Packaging Issue 6 | No specific clauses (customer focus was removed) |
| BRCGS Agents & Brokers Issue 3 | 3.4.1 Customer requirements 3.4.2 Communication of customer requirements to suppliers of products and services |
| BRCGS Storage & Distribution Issue 4 | 10.3.2.1 X, 10.3.2.2 X Customer requirements 13.1 Customer contracts 14.2 Contract review |
| FSSC22000 Version 6 | No specific clauses |
| IFS Food Version 8 | No specific clauses |
| SQF Edition 9 | No specific clauses |
| FSMA Preventive controls for human food (Final 2015) | No specific clauses |
| Additional standards | TESCO, M&S, Sainsburys |
The requirements
Customer standards
There must be a system in place to highlight when customers have their own standards that must be adhered to.
Customer standards must be communicated to relevant staff and kept up to date. Where customer standards must be shared with the businesses material suppliers or contactors, there must be a system(s) in place to ensure that this happens, such as contracts or specifications.
Customer platforms
Staff must be trained to operate customer systems to ensure that:
- Business information is up to date.
- Customer updates are acknowledged and actioned.
Management system
There must be a management system in place that ensures compliance to customer standards.
Customer specifications
All products must have an up-to-date approved customer specification, which details the appropriate product claims and any vulnerable materials used.
Ethical requirements
The business must meet the ethical requirements detailed in the customer standards, this typically requires the application of SEDEX as a minimum.
Customer KPIs
Customer information must be logged and trended, based on agreed KPIs (key performance indicators). The results of these must be communicated to site teams, management and used to create customer reports.
Supplying information
The business must provide information requested by the customer, where it relates to their product.
Reporting
Communicating information to customers, is a critical aspect of the standard.
Businesses must communicate in a timely manner to their customers, when there’s an upcoming change in allergen status of the site, materials or product, or when an incident puts their product at risk, including:
- A CCP failure.
- Detected Listeria monocytogenes.
- A serious foreign body contamination.
- A regulatory notice.
- Legal issue, such as quantity.
- Incorrect labelling or date coding.
BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9
There are no changes to the standard, which impact this topic.
How to manage customer standards
It’s not easy to manage multiple standards, especially when it comes to completing internal audits.
Historically, there are two ways of auditing multiple standards:
- Audit each customer standard separately.
- Combine the customer standards so that they can be audited once.
Both of these options cause issues.
Auditing each customer standard separately, is ineffective:
- It takes a huge amount of time.
- It’s repetitive.
- It creates duplicate non-conformances.
Putting all the requirements of the customer standards together, means that you can reduce the amount of time that the audits take, however, this creates a huge spreadsheet which is a nightmare to manage and keep up to date.
The solution
There is now a third option – audIT.app.
At Techni-K, we appreciate how difficult it is to manage multiple standards, so we’ve specifically designed audIT.app to solve this problem.
We look after the customer standards for you, allowing you to carry out one set of audits which comply with all of the standards that you require. Where there’s an update to any of the standards, we review the change and ensure that it’s implemented.
The questions in the GMP inspections and system audits are populated for you. They’re not a copy and paste of the standard, but instead, they provide questions and instructions for the auditors and inspectors to follow. This means that those carrying them out, don’t have to interpret the standard, as we’ve already done that.
Every question is also referenced with the clause or clauses that it comes from. This means that you can link every question back to the customer standard, so that you can prove to an auditor that you’re auditing each clause.
If you want to simplify the management of your customer standards using audIT.app, get in touch and we can organise a demo and show you how it works.
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