The animal feed industry is now, more than ever, focusing on good manufacturing practices. Therefore, the sourcing of high quality and safe raw materials is becoming ever so important. At Novatek Animal Feeds, the procurement and technical team ensures that all raw materials and ingredients sourced for feed production meet the required ISO 22000 standards to which Novatek complies. In this case, procurement ensures that similar standards such as GMPs, ISO and FAMI QS are practiced by the suppliers from where the raw materials and ingre-dients are sourced.
Quality
The procurement team provides quality checks and controls at the beginning of the supply chain. Documents such as the Certificate of Conformance, Certificate of Analysis, and Health Certificate have to be secured before the raw materials can be imported or sourced. The Government Veterinary Offices also play an important role, as they make the final decision by supplying the vete-rinary certification and import permit licenses.
The technical team at Novatek ensures on-site inspection upon receipt, to check that raw materials conform to their set standards and that the received raw materials are safe for feed production. This also applies to all local raw materials that are subjected to lab tests before being received. This ensures immediate detection of nonconforming inputs and rejection of consignments if need be.
Not only are Novatek’s inspectors particular at ensuring that the raw materials meet their ISO 22000 standards, they also ensure that all plant spares and consumables used are food grade quality. Spares and consumables may include, among others, all lubricants, bucket elevator belts, cups and stainless-steel platforms, augers, conveyors and the feed packaging materials.
Cost
Procurement plays an integral part in ensuring that the raw materials and plant spare parts meets set standards of the highest quality, but also ensure that these materials are sourced from the most economically advantageous suppliers. This, in turn, results in streamlining total cost of acquisition and ensures certainty of costs and ease of planning. In the end, their customers get the highest quality feed at affordable prices.
Their suppliers are periodically evaluated against quality, delivery reliability and their capabilities to ensure continuous improvement of the quality and food safety of raw materials that’s being sourced.
Time
Total lead times considerations for critical inputs are of utmost importance. The Novatek procurement team ensures timely availability of inputs through proper procurement planning and contingency planning for stock replenishment. This ensures that the production of feed is never interrupted as a result of a stock out on raw materials.
In that way, the procurement team make sure that customers receive ordered feed within a reasonable time frame as the lives of their customers livestock depends on it.
Although the procurement team often works behind the scenes, they play an integral part in the production of animal feed. It is the ultimate commitment of the entire team that facilitate for making animal feed easily and readily available to farmers. In the end the procurement of raw-materials plays an important part on how all animals perform on Zambian farms.