Meating your supplier management needs

Do your suppliers have the right ingredients?

The choice of which food to cook is vast much like the choices you often face when selecting which supplier has the right ingredients for you.

When choosing a supplier, we need to be very picky; will they meet the requirements your customers expect? Are they offering value? Are they compliant with modern slavery, ethical trading, sustainability and animal welfare standards? Do they meet up to the high standards of food safety including BRC and quality procedures needed?

The global meat market supply chain is huge, with ingredients sourced from multiple suppliers and countries. Ineffective systems, such as paper-based records and manual spreadsheets, can make supply chain risk management more difficult than needs which results in a high administrative burden.

Obtaining a full 360^o overview of supplier statues can be a complex job, particularly as the ‘steaks’ can be high, especially when you need to select and on-board new suppliers. The issue is magnified when trying to ensure your full team or even multiple teams across your organisation can access the information instantly.

curing your supplier management woes

There are several methods generally used for recording, updating and maintaining essential information, ranging from paper-based systems and manual spreadsheets to specialist software. Each varies in efficiency and effectiveness, for example, paper or spreadsheet-based methods can be notoriously difficult (a pig to manage) and time-consuming – as well as being subject to human error. Even so, research shows that 52% of food manufacturers surveyed use manual systems to manage supplier information.

Companies that have transparency in their supply chain, by using online supply base management systems, such as ARCUS^® SIM, have a clear advantage.

SIM places the responsibility on the supplier to provide the user with all of their key information upon registration, this could include BRC, HACCP, antibiotic usage and sustainability policies and certifications. Digitising your supplier on-boarding and approval using ARCUS^® workflow will streamline the process.

SIM features automatic scoring of responses based on company requirements to easily identify suppliers who are compliant and those who are not. This reduces risk and provides auditable evidence of due diligence when selecting compliant suppliers. All the information is stored in one central online system, accessible by all stakeholders, enabling quick and easy access by assigned users from anywhere. Access to the information enables multiple stakeholders across departments to collaborate and have full visibility of the latest information without the danger of reviewing superseded data.

ARCUS^® is fully configurable, the process and the data collected can be tailored to make sure it is exactly to your taste much like a great BBQ.

Visit our ARCUS^® SIM product page for more information on our cloud-based central platform for collecting, storing and managing supplier data.

In the meantime, get those aprons on, get that meat sizzling and enjoy some great BBQs this week.

To see how you can efficiently capture and approve product information electronically, including technical specifications please see ARCUS^® PIM, our fully integrated product information management module.