Factors Making Auditing and Compliance the Cornerstone of Food and Beverage Manufacturers’ Future Growth

• Audits. Audits are the new normal in food manufacturing compliance. A typical food and beverage manufacturer performs over 60 audits for customers alone every year, with FDA audit and compliance reporting taking hundreds of hours to complete if they’re not automated. However, by automating the auditing and compliance reporting process, you free up your quality management teams to focus on more significant challenges and accelerate your growth.
• Continuous Improvement. Customer-driven audits are one of the most powerful catalysts driving continuous improvement. They contribute to greater customer satisfaction and ultimately more revenue. Rather than fearing audits, you should view them as opportunities for continuous improvement.If you embrace audits as a means of enhancing your processes and product quality, you can not only achieve ISO 9001 certification but also experience long-term sales growth and greater employment opportunities, as evidenced by the Harvard Business School study on Quality Management and Job Quality.

Food and beverage manufacturers dominating their industry segments and markets are always looking for ways to improve. They have learned that getting ISO 9001 certification can help them increase sales in the short term. If they combine this certification with new products and programs and streamline their audit and compliance reporting, they can achieve sustained sales growth. The above landmark study by Harvard Business School found that food and beverage manufacturers who get ISO 9001 certification and stay in compliance with it also experience greater employment and sales growth in the long term.

In other words, ISO 9001 certification helps you improve quality, efficiency and profitability. This leads to increased sales, employment and market share.

Quality audits need to become routine for Food & Beverage manufacturers to achieve consistent, solid growth. Getting into a regular cadence of quality audits creates the intelligence and urgency needed to keep improving every aspect of product quality.

Reasons Why Quality Audits Need to Become Routine in Food & Beverage Manufacturing

Presented below are four reasons why quality audits need to become routine in food & beverage manufacturing:

1.   Enhancing Quality Control

Product quality problems can turn into customer and public relations nightmares incredibly quickly. Completing periodic internal audits to track major and minor quality issues by product is essential for staying on top of any potential major product non-conformances. Capturing trending data based on noncompliance / corrective action (NC/CA), Corrective Action / Preventative Action (CAPA) and customer requests, then scoring non conformances using a quality management system helps in defining which quality issue gets addressed first.

2.   Automated Audits

Automating audits are indispensable in building a knowledge base capable of tracking and predicting quality performance. An MES designed to capture, aggregate and provide predictive analytics is invaluable to any food & beverage manufacturer today. The more detailed and robust the data captured in automated audits, the better. With reliable quality data, an MES and Quality Management system can provide you with insights into points of product and process weakness not visible before. Additionally, every new insight discovered adds to the knowledge base available for solving future quality challenges.

3.   Audit Data-Backed Recommendations

Providing improvement recommendations based on recent audit data to senior executive quality champions get results. Make the most of the time communicating with senior executives and leadership by providing clear recommendations for quality improvement based on actual data. By anchoring recommendations on audit data, the senior execs who are championing quality have what they need to take action. The Harvard Business School study also found that by doing audits regularly, manufacturers learn how to make cost reductions permanent at the process level.

4.   Customer-Focused Audits

Focus on customer-based metrics and KPIs when auditing operations plant-wide and track how well operations are performing against the plan. Often the most valuable audits find where internal disconnects are causing customers lost time, orders and the potential to generate more revenue on their own. Audits need to track and trend order entry accuracy, warehouse pick accuracy, on-time delivery percentage, orders shipped without damage (% of orders shipped damage-free) and percentage of orders invoiced correctly.

Conclusion

At Ultra Consultants, we specialize in assisting food and beverage manufacturing companies with technology selection to ensure compliance, maintain product quality, build customer trust and achieve sustainable growth. When you are ready to embrace automated auditing and compliance reporting systems, reach out to us, and we'll get an expert to assist you in creating a path forward. You'll work with us to establish robust compliance management systems, fostering a culture of compliance and conducting regular audits, so your company is able to navigate the complexities of the industry and meet regulatory requirements effectively.