BSI brings visibility to supply chain

BSI Supply Chain Services and Solutions has released food safety and fraud intelligence and assessment modules to help industry mitigate potential threats that could affect customers, their brand and bottom line.

The modules allow users to monitor and assess the threat of food contamination, adulteration, mislabelling and recalls.

Supply Chain Risk Exposure Evaluation Network (SCREEN) has launched two risk indicators, food safety and food fraud, that provide threat ratings for 200+ countries along with risk maps and qualitative reports.

Putting data into context to make decisions

SCREEN's Food Module provides insight into food safety and fraud risks as well as corporate social responsibility and business continuity threats and trends that could impact the supply chain.

The module provides real-time updates regarding incidents such as contamination, fraud, safety, forced labour, natural disasters, theft and smuggling to help users monitor and manage potential supply chain exposures.

Jim Yarbrough, global intelligence program manager, said SCREEN provides insight and intelligence on what it means for the users supply chain and impact on them.

“Other systems provide a constant stream of incidents but if you don’t have the time and want to know what does it mean for me? We put it in context. Users let the system know which countries are important so it understands and only sends information on them,” he said.

“It is updated every day, we have an analyst who goes through information and is responsible for determining what goes in our internal database and what goes on the front page to alert the user.

“We don’t want to inundate the user with data as they won’t use the system. If they are thrown a lot of data we are not doing a service, it is important to narrow down the noise so the end user gets value.

Companies can then implement their own mitigation strategies according to what threat ratings are used to determine where to send on-site auditors.”

The intelligence platform is an annual subscription model and allows contact with an intelligence analyst.

Risk rating based on 25 factors

Yarbrough said risk is rated on a five point scale from low to severe.

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BSI's Supplier Compliance Manager (SCM) Food Module (Hand-out/BSI)

“We look at the regulatory framework in a country, capacity of government or the enforcement body, industry and government outreach, international co-operation and historical occurrence,” he said.

“We are seeing a rapid evolution, a move away from spreadsheets even in organisations with fewer suppliers. The world spins so fast with changing risk and compliance systems; it is a management decision to use such tools to be in front of the curve as they don’t want to be caught up in an issue.”

BSI has also launched a Supplier Compliance Manager (SCM) Food Module to help manufacturers and retailers assess the quality, safety and security of their supply chain and business partners.

SCM manages self-assessments, on-site audits, corrective actions and communications with a dashboard to track program progress year over year.

It provides templates based on Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), Threat Assessment Critical Control Point/Vulnerability Assessment and Critical Control Points (TACCP/VACCP) criteria.