How to Trust Your Data

Risks in the food industry are numerous and need to be taken seriously, and they can crop up in unexpected places. Collecting essential data on supplier compliance and the ingredients and products you use, as well as checking accreditations against safety standards such as GFSI Standards, ISO and HACCP can help to mitigate these risks. As a professional working in food safety and quality, data is likely your bread and butter. But how can you trust the data you’re collecting and basing your important decisions on? How can you spend less time manually collating data, and more time analysing it? 

I’ve been working in the software industry for many years – predominantly in the food and beverage industry – closely with food safety, quality, and technical professionals to build the tools which work for them. Here’s some of what I’ve learned: 

Sustainability Matters 

Safety is always at the top of the list of priorities. Sustainability is now moving up the list too. It matters to the companies your company is selling to. It matters to the consumers all the way at the end of the supply chain. It matters that the ingredients in the food you are inspecting, as well as being of the best quality, are also sustainable – whether through sustainable sourcing, or reducing food waste throughout the supply chain, or another method. Sustainability is now invariably linked to quality – and rightfully so. Ensuring that sustainability information and credentials are collected and inspected alongside your usual data points is no longer optional. 

Automation is the Present and Future 

It’s no secret that the key to ensuring efficiency in your data-related processes is automation. Automating what you feasibly can, will go a long way to improving your daily working life and your effectiveness. Implementing and maintaining an effective quality management system, ensuring automation is an included feature, will massively help. Taking it out of your hands, so to speak, can be daunting, but also liberating. Make sure you have a hand in creating the workflows and processes, and you’ll still be in control, even if you’re not precisely hands-on. 

Validating Supplier Information Doesn’t Have to be Hard 

Understanding your suppliers at a macro level is a great first step. Taking this further by considering and checking accreditations will elevate your data collection strategy. There are tools you can use to ease the burden of collecting and verifying supplier information – I know, because I’ve helped build them. Coupled with automated processes like I mentioned before, using integrations to validate your supplier information will save you time and stress and allow you to trust your data. 

In my experience, being able to trust the data you collect in relation to your role in food safety and quality makes a significant difference to your performance. Having a reliable system in place to support and improve your processes is a key aspect which will inspire confidence. Confidence in your data removes the roadblocks of spending time manually checking over that data, so you can spend that time on the tasks you can’t automate.  

Intrigued by the prospect of automating processes to save you time, and integrating directly with the certification bodies you need to validate your suppliers against? Check out the ARCUS^® platform.