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. It’s time to get over the fear many food and beverage manufacturers have regarding audits and instead see them as coaching feedback of how to improve. Food and beverage manufacturers dominating their industry segments and markets are always looking for ways to improve. They’ve learned that ISO 9001 certification generates an initial sales bump that can be turned into long-term sales acceleration if combined with new products and programs when streamlined with audit and compliance reporting. Food and beverage Manufacturers who attain and stay in compliance with ISO 9001 attain greater employment and sales growth long-term based on the Harvard Business School Working Paper, Quality Management and Job Quality: How the ISO 9001 Standard for Quality Management Systems Affects Employees and Employers by David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel.

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 problems incredibly quickly. Completing periodic internal audits to track major and minor non-conformances 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 nonconformances using a quality management system can help 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 insights into points of product and process weakness not visible before. Every new insight discovered adds to the knowledge base available for solving future quality challenges too.

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.

These factors define perfect order performance.

Excelling at perfect order performance is the first step to driving up customer trust and the opportunity to sell to them again.

Contact the experts at Ultra Consulting for more information on how the right technology can help with food manufacturing compliance. You'll work with us to establish robust food manufacturing 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.