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Food quality and food safety are among the most critical concerns of all companies in the food supply chain, especially foodservice operators. Foodservice operators today must strive to meet food quality and safety demands arising from a host of sources:
- Consumers - Increasing consumer sophistication about food composition, nutritional content and safety issues, means that operators cannot afford to compromise on product quality, process controls or cleanliness of facilities.
- Competition - Today’s consumer has an ever-increasing array of choices vying for his dining-out budget. One bad experience may be the last chance a restaurant has for a share of that consumer’s foodservice dollars.
- Supply Chain - With a diverse and complex supply chain, it can be a challenge to ensure consistency of product quality. Non-conforming products from suppliers impose substantial costs on the foodservice operator.
- Regulators - Federal and local regulatory agencies are applying more stringent oversight to all sectors of the food supply chain. FDA-promulgated Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) guidelines are widely recognized as a successful component of a foodservice operator’s comprehensive food safety program. The threat of increased regulation looms as congress continues to pass new legislation regarding food handling and preparation, such as the Public Health Security and Bio-terrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002.
MetricStream and Instill: Ingredients For Success
MetricStream has partnered with Instill Corporation, a leading vendor of foodservice technology solutions, to address the pressing quality and safety demands faced by the foodservice operator. Instill (www.instill.com) provides restaurant operators with a version of MetricStream's Enterprise Quality and Compliance Management solution designed specifically to meet the quality management needs of the foodservice industry. Operators employing the MetricStream solutions can realize substantial benefits, which include:
- Protect brand image and market share by ensuring consistent quality of products and service
- Reduce liability from food-borne illness events
- Reduce materials and ingredients costs through recovery of Cost of Poor Quality from suppliers
- Provide incentive to suppliers to consistently raise quality by tying business volume to quality performance scores
- Ensure compliance with quality and safety regulations, and reduce costs of regulatory compliance, through automation of quality management tasks
The MetricStream Solution
MetricStream’s solution is the only Quality and Compliance Management Software solution designed to scale across the entire extended enterprise. It ties together critical quality processes, communications and data from dispersed restaurant locations, corporate headquarters, customers and suppliers. The result is a holistic quality management system which speeds resolution of quality issues, helps prevent quality problems through dissemination of localized knowledge, and provides for greater transparency and accountability in all quality-related processes.
All the modules of the Quality Management System are 100% web-based, GMP compliant and fully-integratable with each other and to other enterprise systems. MetricStream’s Quality Management System (QMS) for foodservice includes the following modules:
Non-Conformance Management (NCM) enables identification of non-conforming (out-of-spec) products initiated by inspection of incoming materials, customer complaint or internal process measures. NCM provides for containment action generation and assigns disposition status. A customer portal is included, as well as multi-level dashboards and a built-in analytics engine.
Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA) is a system of structured, documented actions taken to address existing product or quality problems, and prevent their recurrence. The CAPA module can be used by restaurant staff and headquarters management to record and investigate product, process or supplier non-conformance problems, perform root-cause analysis and impact analysis, and track progress of events through to resolution. CAPA includes notification and escalation features and dashboard analytics to track CAPA status and cost metrics.
Complaint Management enables foodservice operators to log complaints against suppliers and distributors, and supports corrective action and dispute resolution procedures (including charge-back functionality). Complaint Management includes reports and dashboards to monitor complaint volume by vendor and product, and charge-back amounts and disposition.
Audit Management provides for creation and management of periodic scheduled or event-driven audit requirements, whether initiated by customers, internal teams or regulatory agencies. Audit Management includes pass/fail results based on qualitative and quantitative criteria, reporting results and follow-up actions to standards bodies, hierarchical audit model and success criteria, and dashboard analytics.
Training Management allows for scheduling of training and education sessions for employees, and maintaining training history records. The module includes features such as refresher training, content review and trainee evaluation. Reports and dashboards are used to track training costs and perform training gap analysis.
Equipment Management is used for scheduling inspection and preventative maintenance of equipment and devices. It includes notifications and alerts on pending preventative maintenance schedules.
Document Management provides a central repository of all quality documents to be accessed by employees, customers and suppliers, as well as other applications. Document Management controls the creation, maintenance and retrieval of documents relating to Standard Operating Procedures, instructions, product specifications, recipes and handling procedures, and regulatory materials. The module includes access control, document sharing, editing, updating and version control features.
MetricStream’s quality and compliance management solutions help Foodservice Operators benefit significantly through the use of software solutions that enable regulatory compliance and increase operations efficiency. Through our enterprise-class quality management solutions we can help power organizations by reducing administrative and operating costs, achieve business objectives, competitive advantage and increased market share. For more information on implementing solutions for your enterprise, please contact us at 650-620-2955, or by email at info@metricstream.com.
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