CASE STUDY
MetricStream
ONE OF THE TOP PROVIDERS OF THIRD-PARTY FOOD
SAFETY AUDIT
Benefits
Faster and more efficient audits: Along with
enhanced capabilities to plan, and schedule audits
quickly and efficiently, the audit team at the company
can now handle addendums, review and analyze the
audit findings, initiate corrective/preventive actions
as required and follow-up on these action plans, thus
conducting and monitoring the entire closed-loop
audit process expertly and swiftly.
Minimized error count: Systematic and workflow-
driven audit process across the enterprise with
standardized data collection, remediation workflows,
and time tracking has helped the company to
minimize audit errors and inconsistencies in the audit
process.
Increase in staff efficiency: With automation
and streamlining of the entire audit process, the
audit staff at the company now experiences higher
efficiency and can focus on value-oriented functions
such as analyzing and recognizing trends in the audit
data.
Clear visibility: The application’s powerful analytics
and reporting capability with graphical dashboards
to track each audit from initiation to closure gives
the managers at the company a complete and
real-time visibility into the safety, compliance the
quality system. This bird’s eye view of the entire
audit process and metrics has led to better risk
management and assured compliance for the
company.
Improved performance evaluation: Unifying
all quality and compliance data into one central
repository, the company has leveraged robust
reporting capabilities. These coupled with dashboards
and alerts to easily identify trends, overdue actions
and other performance metrics have helped the
company’s staff to improve their performance
evaluation.
FOOD SAFETY AUDIT PROVIDER MINIMIZES FOOD SAFETY RISK
AND ENHANCES OPERATIONAL COMPLIANCE
Customer
The customer is a leading provider of third-party food safety audit and education services to broad
segments of the food manufacturing industry including food, ingredients and beverage manufacturing,
packaging, production and distribution facilities.
Overview
Headquartered in the US, the company today is an industry leader in the areas of audit services and
food safety education.
With major industry players as its audit clients, the company is committed to protecting the safety
of the entire food supply chain. Many of the world’s largest food manufacturers, distributors and food
service operators, rely on the company’s audits.
The company’s food safety audit services include Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) inspection and
audits for Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), customer audits and quality system audits.
Being in the business of building reputation and setting quality standards, efficient audit management
for accurate evaluation of clients’ processes and products is of utmost importance to the company.
Challenge
Caught in the whirlpool of fast-paced, technology-driven business world, the company found itself
faced with challenges such as:
Handling manual processes: With the expansion of operations in various countries, auditing
facilities spread over thousands of manufacturing and distribution sites worldwide, rapidly increasing
clientele, and a huge auditor base to manage the company’s thousands of email-based manual audits
were proving time-consuming, scattered and less effective.
Managing legacy applications: Multiple stand-alone legacy applications – home-grown as well
as configured – were used to manage various processes. These needed a huge amount of human
intervention leading to duplication and inaccuracies. The management of these applications was a
herculean task, not to mention the time and cost metrics impacted.
Incorporating new quality standards: Constant changes with new and more stringent quality
standards and regulations appearing in the food safety space posed another challenge. The company
needed to easily integrate latest industry best practices in the food safety compliance space into its
audit and inspection processes and keep up with latest developments.
Lack of single integrated system: Absence of a common integrated platform was affecting
the company’s audit operations in terms of planning, scheduling inspections, resourcing, time
tracking, workflow management, handling customer specific addendums, to name a few. Inability to
automatically aggregate the information for analysis, slow and laborious manual aggregation with a
risk of inconsistency, lack of common approach for capturing data elements were some of the specific
issues the company was trying to resolve.
MetricStream
Solution
The company needed to automate and streamline its food safety audits and inspection services and
sought a robust and comprehensive business process solution that would enable the departments of
the company’s food safety business to operate at optimum efficiency.

After evaluating several audit management products in the market based on a variety of criteria, the
company selected MetricStream’s Audit Management System as the best fit for its requirements.

MetricStream’s Automated Quality management system (QMS): The system is a comprehensive,

Web-based audit application deployed on MetricStream Governance Risk Compliance (GRC) Platform
and designed to manage a wide range of audit-related activities, data and processes. The flexibility of
the system supports all types of audits, including operational audits, supplier audits, distributor audits,
product audits and quality audits. The audit channels and the auditors have separate log-ins to the
application enabling access and providing real time communication to every user involved in the audit
process.

Auditors at the company use MetricStream’s Automated Quality Management System to conduct
audits and inspections at numerous manufacturing and distribution facilities worldwide. The applica-
tion provides workflow, collaboration and reporting capabilities to allow the auditors, management
and support staff at the company to efficiently plan and schedule audits, establish inspection criteria,
execute audits, submit and collect audit results, track findings and issues, create audit reports and
streamline inter-departmental coordination. Email based notifications and alerts allow the company to
integrate the industry best-practices into audit management system.

The application provides an exhaustive audit view. A click on any higher level audit element on the
portal drills-down to the lower level audit elements, giving the user a complete view of the audit and
its results.

Users have a role-based portal access with options required for initiating actions, responding to
events, managing checklists and assigning tasks, viewing reports and dashboards, limited to their
roles.
The application includes an offline functionality which allows the company’s auditors to conduct
audits at remote field sites with limited or no access to the Internet.

“MetricStream provides a holistic view for critical decision making – and we believe the
solution has greatly strengthened our food safety initiatives while improving our overall
goal of seeking operational efficiencies that will secure customer confidence and satisfac-
tion,” articulates the spokesperson of the company.

Roles and functionalities: The application portal is designed for the following roles: Scheduler, Audi-
tor, Report Coordinator, Report Processor, Director, Administrator, and Customer.

Using MetricStream’s QMS system the schedulers at the company can set up audits, manage audit
accounts and check auditor’s availability. Schedulers can create audits for as long as five years
period. They can modify audit dates with the modification getting reflected in the entire system and
communicated to the relevant staff members via email.

Apart from executing the audits, Auditors can view their calendar, unscheduled audits, rejected audit
reports. Auditors can organize an audit in a logical structure and hierarchy with detailed audit tem-
plates and work orders. In case of audits at remote field sites, checklists can be downloaded and used
offline using the MetricStream’s Briefcase feature.

Auditors can maintain detailed scorecards for both suppliers and individual stores or outlets. The
report data identifies stores, outlets and suppliers who display poor performance consistently.

Why MetricStream
The company selected MetricStream for this engage-
ment based on the following qualities:
MetricStream has relevant experience and deep
understanding of subtle nuances specific to the food
safety audit and compliance segment.
MetricStream’s all-encompassing approach is pro-
jected through its integrated platform with a complete
workflow automation of the entire closed-loop audit
process.
MetricStream solution offers advanced built-in func-
tionalities to ensure integration of the audit process
with the risk and compliance management system.
MetricStream has the ability to support large orga-
nizations in the areas of integration, configurability,
scalability and security.
For more information, visit
www.metricstream.com
Copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved.
Auditors can examine the responses given by the channel for which the audit was conducted, approve
or reject the same and track all issues identified and recommendations made as a result of the audit.
Report Administrator can create audit efficiency report, discrepancy report, closed business report,
and auditors score trend. Audit reports are assessed in real time while simultaneously a repository of
previous results is maintained, giving the auditors and managers a complete trail of events – an audit
trail.
Directors can review all reports using the application. Administrators can create and upload check-
lists, create and manage addendums, create auditor profiles, manage customer reports.
Customers can view audit instance reports, score reports, performance reports using the Metric-
Stream application. Alternatively, these reports can also be sent to the customer via email.
Deployment model and customization: MetricStream carried out a hosted deployment of the solu-
tion saving the company the administrative and implementation costs associated with installing and
managing an in-house system.
Taking into account the requirements of the company and the size of operations, MetricStream team
configured its Audit Management System to include all the nuances of the company’s business.
MetricStream also performed data migration for a huge amount of information from various legacy
systems and excel sheets at the company into MetricStream Application. The data included details
of over 12,000 customer organizations of the company, over 18,000 audit templates used by the
company for assessments, and over 28,000 records of customer contacts including their log records –
notifications, certification history.
MetricStream’s Automated Quality Management System replaced a number of legacy applications at
the company and integrated a few into the MetricStream system platform.
During the deployment, MetricStream followed the timelines of the original plan very strictly as the
company’s audit schedules were planned based on the deployment completion date and the auditors’
training time on the MetricStream application.