(MetricStream Inc.: Palo Alto, CA) – AIB International, one of North America’s largest providers of third-party food safety audits, recently selected MetricStream, a provider of enterprisewide governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions, for implementing an audit management system to automate and streamline its food safety audits and inspections services.

AIB’s services are used by many of the world’s largest food manufacturers, distributors, and food service operators, including 83 of the top 100 North American food processors. Their primary objective is reducing risk and ensuring compliance with food safety and quality regulations and standards including the Food and Drug Administration’s good manufacturing practices (GMP), the (Dutch) National Board of Experts Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (NBE HACCP), ISO 22000—”Food safety management systems—Requirements for any organization in the food chain,” the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) Global Standard for Food Safety, and the Safe Quality Food (SQF) 2000 Code. AIB’s Gold Standard Certification Program is widely recognized as an industry benchmark for food quality and safety.

In a comprehensive evaluation, AIB reviewed several audit management products in the market on a variety of functional and technical criteria as well as the vendors understanding of risk and compliance issues related to food safety and health. MetricStream, an industry-leader in GRC platform technology and known for its audit management solution, emerged as the preferred choice based on its domain expertise and the strength of its technology and solutions.

“We chose MetricStream because their solutions are designed for a truly integrated approach for managing audits, risks, compliance, and safety programs across our organization’s operation. MetricStream provides a holistic view for critical decision making—and we believe the solution will greatly strengthen our food safety initiatives while improving our overall goal of seeking operational efficiencies that will secure customer confidence and satisfaction,” says Maureen Olewnik, AIB vice president of audit and technical services.

MetricStream will enable AIB to apply industry best practices in food safety audits, inspections, and compliance with an easy-to-use audit management application deployed on its enterprise GRC platform. The system will be used by AIB auditors who conduct audits and inspections at more than 10,000 manufacturing and distribution facilities in the United States and worldwide. The solution will provide workflow, collaboration, and reporting capabilities to allow auditors, management, and support staff to efficiently plan and schedule audits, establish inspection criteria, submit and collect audit results, track findings and issues, create audit reports, and streamline interdepartmental coordination.

“For food and beverage companies, the risks from not meeting safety and compliance can be severe financially and through loss of brand equity in the market place,” says Carl McCauley, MetricStream vice president of sales. “By unifying quality, safety, risk, audit, and compliance programs on MetricStream Enterprise GRC Platform, customers can define and execute consistent and systematic processes to achieve significant performance improvements.”

MetricStream provides web-based, end-to-end solutions to support compliance and quality programs for food safety. MetricStream solutions give food manufacturers and distributors the ability to collaborate internally and with their trading partners, providing real-time view into safety, compliance, and quality. By unifying all quality and compliance data into one central repository, food and beverage companies can leverage robust reporting, dashboards, and alert capabilities to easily identify trends, overdue actions, and other performance metrics while maintaining detailed scorecards against key performance indicators. This increases overall efficiency in their food quality and safety management program.