You asked the essential questions about FSMA compliance, and now your FSMA plan is probably in full swing. With FSMA’s hundreds of guidelines and requirements, this is obviously a tall order, and if you’re not careful it can have a significant impact on your business. So the question is “How do you consistently meet FSMA requirements without putting stress on your business or raising your operational costs?”

Technology is the answer.

How Food Safety Tech Helps

To be successful, you need a flexible and complete auditing platform that performs a wide range of functions. You’ll need to do all the following with one platform:

• consistently monitor, test, and audit your preventative controls
• perform regular quality checks
• accurately document the results to verify compliance
• use data to enable continuous improvement
• manage your suppliers

With this type of technology foundation in place, improving the quality and safety of your products and meeting FSMA requirements becomes more manageable and significantly less expensive.

How to Choose the Right Food Safety Tech

This is all well and good in theory, but you next question is probably “What does an efficient, effective FSMA auditing solution look like, how much will it cost, and what core characteristics and capabilities should it include?”

The good news is that recent technology advancements have already changed the game in your favor. With the convergence of three major technology trends — cloud, mobile, and blockchain — it has become much easier to implement an advanced, FSMA-friendly food safety auditing and verification system, either as an extension of your existing auditing framework or as a standalone food safety auditing solution. Here are just a few of the key advantages and capabilities this type of next-generation auditing solution can offer your organization:

• Speed and Mobility: A cloud-based auditing system with a strong mobile component allows internal food safety managers and external suppliers to use their smartphones or tablets to conduct FSMA and other food safety audits. It then easy send the results to a centralized cloud-based engine where they instantly become part of a centralized and searchable body of knowledge.

Blockchain tech takes it a step further, linking your data in “unbreakable” chains. This means you can respond quickly to any recall scenarios as well as generate immediate reports for the FDA. These processes took days before blockchain, and now each can be addressed in seconds to minutes.

• Intelligence: Collecting and making FSMA auditing information available quickly is important, but it’s not enough. By making good use of cloud-based intelligence, your auditing solution can also recognize important food safety issues or problems as they occur, compare results from specific locations to a larger body of company-wide results, and then automatically initiate action. This kind of machine intelligence essentially connects individual food safety auditing results to your larger food safety standards and processes, making it easy to quickly turn food safety data into company-wide improvements.
• Flexibility and Efficiency: Achieving consistent FSMA compliance involves monitoring and tracking hundreds of ever-changing details and preventative controls across all of your different departments and locations. This requires an auditing foundation that’s flexible enough to accommodate high levels of complexity. With the right kind of cloud-based auditing foundation, you make it possible for the appropriate people and teams to quickly create, modify, and manage a centralized collection of FSMA checklists and instructions, so local managers, employees, and suppliers always have access to the latest standards, requirements, and information.
• Control: Every auditing process, including FSMA, includes diverse teams of people filling many different roles. For your food safety auditing system to function properly, you need the ability to grant very specific access rights to people and groups based on those roles. For example, with the proper controls in place, you can give local managers access to their own customized sets of tools and information. You can also give FSMA experts at the corporate level permission to create and modify food safety questions and instructions that are limited to their job functions. In other words, by building fine-grained access control into your FSMA monitoring and auditing solution, you can easily add resources that focus exclusively on FSMA requirements without getting in the way of other core auditing functions.

The bottom line is that when you deploy a mobile, cloud-based auditing solution with these capabilities and characteristics, you create a framework that allows you to quickly create custom surveys and checklists, make them easily accessible to specific people or groups in your organization, collect the results in near real-time, and thoroughly analyze them to gain new insights. Add the visibility and speed that blockchain tech provides, and you ultimately have the power to confidently meet complex FSMA requirements, document your compliance, and adapt quickly to regulatory changes without disrupting your core business or negatively impacting your operational costs.