Safety and Environmental certifications are not just about food and food born illness protection.

December 8th, 2010

What other types of issues should procurement professionals be thinking about relative to product safety and the environment when they talk to their current and future sources od supply?

Many times the ideas for my blog posts come from conversations with customers. Often times those thoughts make it into our product development plans. In fact listening to our customers is one of our most important jobs.

During a visit with a customer several months ago, the head of procurement complimented me on our companies efforts related to food safety and in particular commented on the 27 safety certifications we hold our 380,000 global suppliers accountable to in our SafeSourceIt™ Supplier Database. He followed that with the statement that since they did not sell fresh foods, that area of our business did not apply to them.

This particular retail customer does sell food products, cosmetics, private label bottled water and also bags the products they sell to their customers in plastic bags. I think most of you can see where I’m going with this. Plastic bags are a growing area concern for many areas of the country and in fact outlawed in an ever increasing number of areas due to their negative environmental impact. Food packaging can contain BPA. Dog food has contained products such as melamine. Toys have been found to contain lead.

So, let’s see that’s clothing, packaged foods, pet food, toys and beverages. I guess we have to be careful with all of the products we buy. Suppliers need to be held accountable to a variety of standards and certifications while also providing traceability beyond the one forward and one back standard supported in the industry today.

E- procurement solutions  providers need to be prepared to discuss how they intend to accomplish this for their customers in order to limit end user consumer risk, but also limit risk associated with litigation and other recall related costs that have a direct impact on company profit.

At SafeSourcing, all of our associates support our R4 program of Recycle, Reuse, Replace and Reduce and will be glad to have a detailed discussion relative to product safety and environmental impact and how our tools proactively address these opportunities.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments

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