Say that you are responsible for the partner management of your supply and distribution chain. Within the scope of your responsibility is to assure that all partners are compliant with your food safety, quality and business requirements. Whether your supply chain is a couple hundred partners or your supply chain has thousands or tens of thousands of partners, you need a means to mitigate the confusion of communication, validation of compliance and the appraisal of those partners with a finite number of resources.
What are your options? Hopefully, not paper file folders that no one other than you can review. Or your hard drive, that you can view at work or at home and if necessary forward information to your internal and external partners.
What if the document requirements are 5, 10, or 15 individual documents that need to be managed on a daily basis? Explode those document requirements against the size of your supply chain, the size of the task can be quite alarming and stressful. Couple the document management with the need to provide managers of a different department with partner performance scores on a monthly basis or even on an as needed individual basis, you can be buried within a week.
So, what do you do? You enlist an army. The army is your partners in business. If each of the partners manages just their documents, then the size of the task becomes quite small. You become a manager, not just an administrator chasing paper.
To enable this level of cooperation, you need a transactional high visibility tool that facilitates communication both automatically and interactively. The storage of data just to hit a compliance number of documents is not the end game. The platform must be able to correlate and input relevant data into scorecards for business use so that you are making the best decisions for the business. Developers want to know where they can get new ingredients from good partners, Procurement wants to only purchase from safely approved partners, and you want to assure that the materials you are using from the partners is safe and meets your quality requirements.
Accountability is an interesting word. For example, there are a couple of the new Food Safety Modernization Act regulations that your partners are actually responsible for showing that they are compliant. But you end up having to manage their compliance program to assure your supply chain is safe and compliant. With Share-ify, place the accountability back on the partner. For “Foreign Supplier Verification”, create a list of documents that have to be uploaded on the partner’s website by the “Importer of Record”. The importer must deliver documents to partner website or does not deliver product to your facilities. Another example is within “Preventive Measures for Human Foods”. Your partner is required to notify you of any uncontrolled hazards present in the products. They are required to obtain documentation that you recognize the hazards and have preventive measures in place to mitigate the risk. With transactional processes, this activity becomes quite simple and highly visible to all your team members. This food safety data can be extended and utilized to complete your finished goods hazard and risk assessments.
Share-ify provides you with a means to reduce the food safety and financial risks that may come from your supply chain.