Food and Beverage Industry

Compliant and Integrated Quality Management and Document Control Software for the Food and Beverage Industry

Food and beverage companies are under increasing scrutiny to ensure the safety of their products. Recent high-profile incidents in the food industry have prompted Congress to introduce legislation that will dramatically strengthen the FDA's authority and enforcement capabilities. More and more food companies, for instance, have begun to comply with ISO 22000 initiatives as a way to improve their quality processes and demonstrate their commitment to food safety. ISO 22000 is an international standard that incorporates HACCP principles to identify and control hazards within the food production and supply chain and specifies the requirements for an effective food safety management system. Regardless of regulations however it is important for any food and beverage company to develop a quality system that will consistently output high quality products at the rapid pace required by consumers.

Watch Videos Using MasterControl for FDA Compliance (3:53) Using MasterControl for ISO Certification (2:17) Gaining a Competitive Advantage with MasterControl (2:41)

What Can MasterControl Do for You?

MasterControl document control and process management systems have been primarily designed to automate and streamline the quality management systems of regulated and non-regulated companies. MasterControl's quality management system was also recently selected by the FDA for internal use in the Office of Regulatory Affairs.

Quality Management Challenges in the Food and Beverage Industry

Many food and beverage companies would like to implement an efficient and automated quality management system. However, they often find it difficult to justify the initial expense. Here are a few reasons to consider the initial investment:

• High Costs of Paper: With paper-based or ad-hoc quality management systems (i.e, a system made up of various applications and manual processes) food and beverage companies—in the long run (or even in the short run)—will spend far more on quality mishaps, band-aid fixes, lost information and communication gaps than it will pay for the initial expense of consultation (if necessary) and the automation of the QMS.


• Search and Retrieval Issues: Documentation is the lifeblood of any QMS but can be extremely difficult to search and retrieve when it is managed manually or with an ad-hoc system. MasterControl provides automated search and retrieval of any document (of any file type) from a secure, centralized and web-based system.


• Inefficient Processes: Any quality-related process is cumbersome without automation. Take training, internal audits, customer complaints management, deviations, nonconformance events, CAPA or other quality processes. All of these processes require iterative tasks, meetings, documentation, tracking and reporting. These tasks, when "controlled" without automated solutions take literally ten or twenty times longer than their automated counterparts (if not more). Surely the initial investment is worth the amount of revenue that would be used for administrative personnel, paper and ad-hoc applications.


• Slow Processes: Every glitch in a quality process causes more deviations, more nonconformance events and longer product manufacturing cycles. Slow processes cost more money. Fast, automated processes save money every minute of the working day.


• Poor Turnaround: In quality processes if a change needs to occur but the process for approving that change takes weeks instead of minutes how much money is a food and beverage company losing every day during those weeks when a change is being discovered, manually routed, approved and "implemented" real-time turnaround and response are what save food and beverage companies money.

Learn More

To learn more about MasterControl's software solutions for the food and beverage industry, please feel free to contact a MasterControl representative.