Supplier Quality Assurance workshop

Overview

Your food safety system can be faultless inside your own four walls and still be brought down by something that arrives on a delivery vehicle. A raw material that was never properly specified. A contractor nobody vetted before they walked onto the production floor. A supplier certificate that expired eight months ago. A single-source ingredient with no alternative supplier, discovered only on the morning it fails to arrive. Supplier failures are among the most common causes of recalls, customer complaints and audit non-conformances in the food industry – and almost all of them are preventable long before delivery.

This one-day programme takes delegates through the full supplier quality assurance process as it actually works: assessing material and supplier risk, selecting and approving suppliers, writing specifications that can be measured and enforced, approving service providers and contractors, monitoring performance meaningfully, and dealing with the supplier who is quietly getting worse. It is deliberately not a reading of standards clauses. Ten practical activities put delegates in the decision seat — scoring a real supplier’s risk, judging whether a delivery is accepted or rejected, deciding whether a mixed-evidence supplier is approved, and testing everyday site practices against what the major food safety standards actually require. Delegates will disagree with one another, and that is where the learning happens.

Delegates leave with more than notes. They leave with their own supplier action plan, drafted during the course and ready to implement on Monday morning, plus a practical understanding of where their current supplier controls are strongest and where they are exposed. The programme suits quality and food safety practitioners, procurement and purchasing staff, technical and production managers, and anyone who approves, monitors or buys from suppliers — no prior experience of formal supplier auditing is assumed. Your suppliers are part of your food safety system whether you manage them or not.

Progress Excellence Approach

• Dissecting the requirements of international Food Safety Standards to understand the requirements related to supplier quality assurance from a global perspective.
• Explaining the methodology of a supplier and material risk assessment.
• Facilitate the development of a supplier quality assurance programme.
• Practical guidance on how to approve and monitor material and service suppliers.
• Providing a checklist to determine the relevant improvements that can be made to the supplier quality assurance programme.

The course will equip delegates with the following:

• Understand the requirements of supplier quality assurance from various International Standards
• Awareness of the purpose, objectives and benefits of supplier quality assurance
• Ability to perform a supplier risk assessment
• Understand the practical implications and methods of evaluating, approving and monitoring of suppliers.

The course is best suited to the following audiences:

• HACCP food safety team leaders
• Quality/Technical Manager & Procurement Managers
• HACCP food safety team members (Engineers, Microbiologists, Quality Controllers, Production staff, R&D/NPD staff, Logistics personnel, Buyers)
• Staff tasked with the implementation, maintenance and improvement of the supplier quality assurance system

Delegate assessment will be in the form of:

• Full course attendance
• Successful completion of an on-line assessment (pass mark 70 %).