Implementing an effective response

This course should take about an hour to work through. In addition, we provide checklists and worksheets that we recommend you discuss with your team. Also, you will find a section of your plan template that you should customise for your business.

A straightforward product recall – when it is clear that a safety risk exists, you know where all the product is and can get it back reasonably quickly, can be a fairly straightforward process. However, social media in particular has made major incidents like product recalls more complex and they can quickly escalate into a crisis. That’s why you need to understand why incidents and recalls escalate and how you can prevent them becoming a crisis that can have a significant impact on your business and brands. The logistics of a recall is important but only one part of crisis prevention!

It is often the quality manager or operations manager that is responsible for managing a product recall but as incidents escalate towards a crisis, it is often the communications manager, brand manager, marketing or even the CEO that take over. The fact is that a lot of people have an important functional role to play. The point of this course however is to focus on the overall process that manages both the technical side of incidents and the concerns and expectations of key stakeholders. This course is focussed on that process, not any one functional role. We have incident coordinators that are quality managers, operations managers, marketing managers, communications managers, HR managers, CFO's, risk managers .. The focus of our courses are on the process and building your skills to lead that process.

Absolutely! We encourage companies to have more than one incident coordinator and have multiple members of the incident management team familiar with the tools and processes we teach. We therefore offer discounts to the second and subsequent enrolments from the same company. Please contact us at [email protected] to get a discount coupon before you enrol your second and subsequent people.

About 95% of our program applies to any food or consumer goods industry in any country. It is also based on International Standards, such as the International Standard for Product Recall. Our focus is on good process and leadership skills. For the small amount of our course that is not directly applicable – mostly around regulatory requirements, we provide specific materials for selected countries that we are adding to all the time. If you have questions specific to your country, we can discuss them in our discussion forums or put you in touch with our partners based in the US, the UK and Hong Kong who have collectively worked in most countries in the world!

We support managers in many different countries. The universal currency in international business is the US dollar so rather than having multiple prices, we have one price for each service. If US dollars is an issue for you, please contact us directly and we will try to help you resolve the problem.

As an Australian-based company, we are obliged to charge GST when we deliver a service to someone based in Australia. When we detect an enrolment from someone resident in Australia, we send 10% to the tax department which we can later reconcile with them. For Australian residents, GST is included. For other countries, we are not obliged to charge taxes as far as we are aware as we have no way of reconciling that with the tax departments of other countries. One day someone will figure out a way of doing business globally. Until that day, we'll stick with what we have been told!

We guarantee that the program that we provide will meet any national or international standard. If a regulatory authority or credible agency of any kind finds aspects of our program do not comply, we guarantee to make it compliant or we will give you your money back. In addition, if you complete this course, complete all the worksheets and sections of the plan template and do not believe it will better assist you manage an incident or a product recall, please speak to us about that. Our objective is to help you create a program that is useful and if we can't, we'll give you your money back. If for some reason, we cannot provide you with the course materials as described because of a problem on our side and cannot resolve it within a reasonable amount of time, we will give you your money back. For any other issues, please contact us and ask us to help resolve the problem.

Absolutely. From a product recall perspective, although the international standard for product recall was not written specifically for food, every part of that standard - and this training, is applicable to food companies. As a co-author of that standard, Steve Hather our Director made sure that the standard was applicable to all food and consumer goods companies. More broadly, this program looks at incidents and crises and not just product recalls - it is an integrated process from identifying incidents right through to managing a response and restoring the business. This process is universally applicable to any food or consumer goods manufacturer, distributor or retailer.