V.MFS.2300 - Continuous Assurance Regulatory Tech Grant

Summary

Supply chain participants aim to produce, process, and distribute products in ways that satisfy compliance requirements and enables traceability for biosecurity and food safety responses. Participant business processes are designed to ensure compliance with regulators, customers, and the participant businesses seeking assurances that such compliance requirements are being met. Generating a combined, coherent set of compliance outcomes is technically challenging, time consuming, and costly in human effort providing barriers to improving operational efficiencies or performing traceability analysis.

A new approach, Continuous Assurance, showcases an alternate approach to confirming compliance outcomes by specifying a common set of events across all plants and a common and consistent approach to defining and evaluating compliance, which significantly standardises compliance reporting across the entire industry, offering plant operators significantly improved capabilities for continuous compliance monitoring and reporting, process monitoring and improvement, and traceability analysis, and regulators a common method for consistently, continually, and cheaply evaluating and monitoring plant compliance industry-wide.

Objectives

This project aims to investigate how the red meat processing industry might transition to continuous assurance of compliance, by developing a data-driven approach that can be applied across the entire industry and demonstrating the benefits and applicability of such through a prototype application. This will establish credibility for Continuous Assurance and will facilitate the development of strategies for continuous internal and external auditing. 
The objectives of the project are:
1.    Establish Continuous Assurance framework – map regulatory compliance pathways in red meat processing plants.
2.    Prioritise compliance pathways – conduct a priority assessment of identified compliance pathways and associated data streams.
3.    Develop and deploy a Continuous Assurance prototype application – build a continuous assurance prototype for demonstration to project partners and DAFF.
4.    Progress development of Safe Food Production Queensland’s digital processing plant risk assessment tool using permissioned access to the Continuous Assurance prototype – trended analytics from the Continuous Assurance prototype are available for use in SFQ’s risk assessment tool.
5.    Develop business plan and operating model for Continuous Assurance – a business plan is prepared to support the operation of the continuous assurance application.
6.    Demonstration the utility of the Continuous Assurance prototype to DAFF – compliance reporting and proactive food safety management components demonstrate potential increased efficiency of export processes for DAFF.
7.    Final report – a summary report of the outcomes from objectives 1-6.

Key findings

The Continuous Assurance prototype has been demonstrated to Safe Food Production Queensland with an emphasis on the compliance trend reporting capability of the application. Safe Food Production Queensland acknowledged that Continuous Assurance expands the risk assessment potential of their tool, providing data and trended outcomes across all activities from livestock departing farms or feedlots through to boning and packaging. Whilst Continuous Assurance would undoubtedly aid their risk assessment models, they noted that issue resolution is a key focus for regulators and although Continuous Assurance can be used to demonstrate temporal reductions in non-compliance events, the interventions applied to mitigate or prevent the event from re-occurring are not captured in the current Continuous Assurance prototype.

Benefits to industry

Enliven red meat processing plants to monitor compliance from farm feedlot through to boxed product and inform decision-making to drive business outcomes.

MLA action

Report to be published on MLA Research and Development website.

Future research

The outcome of this project is the successful development and demonstration of the Continuous Assurance application. The following recommendations represent a series of next steps towards commercialisation of Continuous Assurance.
•    Further develop the regulator user interface to incorporate and enable the capture of risk intervention events, pre- and post-mortem inspection results into the investigation mode to provide On-Plant Veterinarians or Australian Government Authorised Officers opportunities to shift towards focusing on verifying outcomes and away from routine inspection.
•    Develop and implement the packaging module into the Continuous Assurance prototype.
•    In conjunction with data system manufacturers, conduct a feasibility assessment for conducting a three-stage (extraction, transformation, and loading) data integration process from existing systems of record to Continuous Assurance’s event store.
•    Further define animal welfare, producer, and quality modules for the Continuous Assurance application.
•    Test and refine the Shiga-toxigenic Escherichia coli predictive model and consider opportunities for the capture of additional data streams that are currently not digitised (e.g. animal mud scores and historical performance of producer).
•    Apply AI/ML methodologies to events contributing to compliance failures and identify mitigation opportunities.