BRCGS Agents and Brokers Issue 3 for Management Course

You may never open a carton of the goods you trade. The Standard still wants to know who in your business answers for them.

Agents, brokers and importers rarely handle the product. A container of spice clears the port, waits in a contracted cold store, is relabelled by a subcontractor and arrives at a manufacturer’s goods-in without anyone from your office touching it. That is exactly why the Standard puts so much weight on decisions made at a desk: which manufacturer a buyer approves and on what evidence, what the cold store contract says about temperatures and records, whether a cheap supplier with a lapsed certificate is quietly kept on, and who takes the call when a recall starts on a Saturday. Those are management decisions, and the Standard treats them that way.

BRCGS Agents and Brokers Issue 3 for Management is a four-hour course for directors, owners and senior managers of trading, import and export, brokerage and agency businesses. It explains what the Global Standard for Agents and Brokers, Issue 3, expects of senior management personally, how the hazard and risk, supplier and service provider systems you pay for actually work, how an audit is graded, and how a certificate is won and kept year after year.

What the course covers

Five modules: the Standard and what it expects of management; senior management commitment, culture and the management system; hazard and risk, suppliers and service providers; traceability, incidents, complaints and people; and the audit protocol, grading and keeping the certificate.

Every module ends with a worked case study from a fictional South African trading business, a knowledge check and a scenario game built on decisions a manager actually faces: whether a supplier’s approval really holds, what to do when a cold store fails over a weekend, how an audit report is graded. The course closes with a proctored final assessment: 40 questions drawn at random, so every attempt is different. 45 minutes, 70 percent to pass, 3 attempts. An ASC certificate is issued on passing.

This is an independent ASC Food Safety course explaining the requirements of the Global Standard for Agents and Brokers, Issue 3, in our own words, with clause references so you can look up the exact wording in your own copy of the Standard. It is not a BRCGS course and it is not endorsed by BRCGS. The certificate is a course completion certificate; it is not a BRCGS qualification and does not indicate BRCGS certification of any company or office. If you are new to the Standard, our Introduction to BRCGS for Agents and Brokers Issue 3 course walks through the requirements section by section; this course builds on it for the people who make the decisions.