Day two of Veeva Industries’ Virtual Summit focused on Quality Management. In addition to scheduled sessions, participants had the opportunity to connect with their peers in live demos and industry roundtables, discuss industry-specific topics, expand their network, and connect 1:1 with Veeva’s product and services team members.
Topics highlighted on day two included:
- The Role of Quality in Strengthening Business & Supply Chain Resilience
- Food Safety in a World of Uncertainty
- At the Speed of Consumer Demand: How Market Leaders Approach Co-Manufacturing Quality Management
Missed any of today’s sessions? You can still register or log in to access sessions on-demand
Featured Industry Speakers
Today’s Summit speakers represent some of the world’s most prominent brands from industries including CPG, chemicals, and food & beverage. Featured speakers included:
- Lee Perry, Vice President, Quality & Food Safety, ADM
- Mike Burness, Global Head of Sustainability and Quality, Arxada
- Gladis Araujo, Global Quality System Vice President, Mattel
- Roberto Buttini, Vice President Global Quality & Food Safety and RD&Q Strategy, Barilla Group
- Rachid Hassairi, Head of Global Procurement Productivity and Suppliers/EM's Development, Kraft Heinz
- Debbie Bootsveld, Vice President Quality, The Hero Group
- Lukas Maksym, Global Industrial Hygiene and Product Purity Management, BASF
- Matthias John, Global Quality Director, Supply & Manufacturing Partners, Unilever
Opening Keynote: The Role of Quality in Strengthening Business & Supply Chain Resilience
With significant impacts from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other global challenges, companies have learned the hard way that the value of scenario planning is limited, and the business would be better served by investing in resilience and agility. What lessons have CPG, food & beverage, and chemical industry leaders absorbed from the recent past?
“From my perspective, as I look back over the last couple of years, the number one word that pops out in my mind is the unknown,” Lee Perry, Vice President, Quality & Food Safety at ADM said. “So I would say my experience is around managing the unknown.”
These challenging business circumstances caused ADM to start by looking at its systems, processes, and the associated risk with its supply chains from a different perspective, towards being more nimble and proactive.
“We are in a very fast pace scenario where we need to be rethinking constantly the way we are doing business and our processes to be more supportive of our supply chain,” Gladis Araujo, Global Quality System Vice President at Mattel said. “Similar to the food industry, our business was growing between 15 to 50 percent because [people were] home with the kids,” Araujo said. “We needed to live with the pandemic and make it work safely in our manufacturing facilities. “
Companies thought they were nimble and agile, Mike Burness, Global Head of Sustainability and Quality at Arxada said, while in reality, they were kidding themselves.
“We had to manage risk differently because we needed either ingredients or services that suddenly weren't available in order to maintain our business and keep it going,” Burness said.
“We also saw a huge impact of people either changing careers, requiring remote, or leaving the business,” he said. “We also had customers running into the same thing, asking if we could supply a product that maybe we weren't supplying before because their original supplier was no longer able to do so.”
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Food Safety in a World of Uncertainty
The pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and a series of high-impact product recalls have put the global food supply chain under considerable strain and displayed signs of its fragility. The panel for this session discussed lessons learned for the future on maintaining a safe food supply chain, as well as possible implications for the wider consumer products industry, for which product safety is a foundation of consumer trust as well.
“We have, in a way, been lucky because we have not been impacted that much,” Roberto Buttini, Vice President Global Quality & Food Safety and RD&Q Strategy at Barilla Group said. “This could have been luck or because of a series of practices that we put in place or maybe due to the structure of our supply chains.”
Although Debbie Bootsveld, Vice President Quality at The Hero Group joined the organization in the midst of the disruptions and didn’t have a reference point to compare the company’s issues with years past, what she saw was the operation become very agile.
“We learned to use existing processes but become more agile with our teams, making sure they could work together quickly and making sure we could escalate at the right time,” Bootsveld said. “We were fortunate not to have disrupted business continuity, but we have had to make decisions to maybe not include certain ingredients in the product design going forward because we could not ensure that there would be a sustainable supply in the future.”
For his part, Rachid Hassairi, Head of Global Procurement Productivity and Suppliers/EM's Development at Kraft Heinz, paid tribute to the efforts of the global food industry over the past few years.
“Everyone did a very good job in continuing and maintaining,” Hassairi said. “We were able to provide food to the world and make sure that people had something to eat.”
At the Speed of Consumer Demand: How Market Leaders Approach Co-Manufacturing Quality Management
CPG companies continually look for ways to innovate faster and offer a more diverse range of products. They are increasingly partnering with co-manufacturers to address consumer needs. Co-manufacturers have traditionally provided CPG companies with additional manufacturing capabilities but are now often providing product innovation and new processing technology capabilities as well.
For Quality departments, managing the quality of these "externally manufactured" products represent a challenge in ensuring consumers' trust in the brands these products are sold. For this panel, industry leaders shared their insights into managing quality in collaboration with their co-manufacturing partners.
“Unilever went through quite a journey in the context of co-manufacturing,” Matthias John, Global Quality Director, Supply & Manufacturing Partners at Unilever said.
“If you go back to five, six, or seven years, our priority was really to produce as many products as possible in-house in our Unilever factories to have that capacity utilization and keeping the technology in our hands,” John said. “However, we noticed what was happening outside the industry with new FMCG and personal care startups who seemed to be quite successful but didn’t have their own factories.”
Many of those companies were doing a lot of their production with co-manufacturers, prompting Unilever to recognize the concept as a strategic enabler for business growth.
Lukas Maksym, Global Industrial Hygiene and Product Purity Management at BASF described some of the ways his organization managed quality with its co-manufacturers.
“We do have a global workflow for contract manufacturing, including quality agreements, spec agreements, certified batch releases, and quality control activities,” Maksym said. “I'm focusing on assurance of GMPs with regard to reproducibility of processes and traceability as well as the prevention of contamination during the outsourced manufacturing process.”
Tomorrow’s Sessions: Regulatory Management
Join us tomorrow for day three of Veeva Industries’ Virtual Summit, which will be focused on critical issues related to Regulatory Management.
View the full agenda, reserve your spot, and access recordings of the sessions here. There is no cost to attend.
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