Food Safety Regulatory Compliance ─ Catalyst for a Lean and Sustainable Food Supply Chain

The global sourcing of ingredients has created complex supply chains, significant management challenges, and additional regulatory compliance requirements. This places tremendous pressure on food manufacturers, many of whom lack the knowledge, concepts, techniques, and procedures to comply with these increased requirements. Providing a roadmap for leveraging existing investments in food safety regulatory compliance into superior inventory management, Food Safety Regulatory Compliance: Catalyst for a Lean and Sustainable Food Supply Chain explains how to implement Lean operating principles to determine what needs to be improved, in what sequence improvements must be addressed, how one improvement feeds another, and the prerequisites for each improvement.

Based on the author’s experience working with hundreds of manufacturers, the book discusses cause-and-effect thinking, data accuracy, process simplification, process reliability, and workforce development. It includes how-to recommendations for implementing best practices to achieve these goals. These recommendations come together in the discussions on Batch-Process ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and also the Lean Management System and the useful techniques within it. The author also discusses the rapidly developing business requirement of sustainability, which is quickly moving from an optional, voluntary, and "nice to do" status to a "must do" status.

The book can be read in whole or in part by everyone from the CEO to the factory floor supervisor; the language is nontechnical. But, to aid comprehension, each chapter concludes with an extensive quiz, and the appendix has definitions that will be new vocabulary for many. Normally large companies have the resources to fund the implementation of best practices, smaller companies less so. This book benefits both. In the case of the small- to medium-size manufacturer, it is a roadmap, and for the major corporation it is a tool to help assist their supplier community. It can help any organization achieve world-class excellence in operations and supply-chain management.

Preston Blevins is a practitioner, consultant, and project manager with a combined experience of over forty years. He has certifications from APICS, the respected supply-chain and operations management association, as a Certified Fellow Production and Inventory Management (CFPIM), Certified in Integrated Resource Management (CIRM), and Certified Supply Chain Professional (CSCP). During his career, he has provided guidance to manufacturers on leveraging information technology to improve productivity, reduce inventory investment, and get in alignment with customer needs. Another career thread is workforce development, and a commitment to the Lean Management System. Preston lived and worked seven years in offshore assignments in the UK, Scandinavia, and Europe. In addition to those offshore assignments, he has collaborated extensively with co-workers in Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and India.

He has managed major multi-year projects such as: new business unit start-up, business unit turn-around, global account management, consulting practice start-up, new product launch, ERP implementations, and Y2K.

One of the industries he specialized in serving are those producing complex, highly engineered devices that require both extensive pre-manufacturing, and post-production engineering services.

In the last decade, he has focused on organizations that manufacture recipe/formula-based products such as food, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and specialty chemicals. All of these industries are working with challenging regulatory compliance requirements, ever increasing global competition, and environmental sustainability requirements.

Preston has authored over thirty professional association conference white papers, numerous magazine articles, and authored a book chapter for a best practices compilation for the cosmetics industry. Topics covered include advanced master scheduling techniques, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), the Lean Management System, managing cultural differences, project-oriented manufacturing, planning and controlling service delivery, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Batch-Process ERP, leveraging food safety regulatory requirements into operational excellence, the need to manage blue (fresh) water in a sustainable manner. He is also a sector author for the APICS Operations Management Body of Knowledge (OMBOK) framework, the definitive text on operations management. Preston is also an active public speaker, and occasional university guest speaker.

He has held many different volunteer executive roles over the last thirty years with APICS, most recently serving on the association's Board of Directors (BOD) and has been a member with ASQ (American Society for Quality), AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence), PMI (Project Management Institute), and IFT (Institute of Food Technologists).