BRCGS Storage and Distribution Issue 4 for Management Course

Product is rarely lost in a warehouse because nobody knew the rule. It is lost because of a decision somebody made months earlier.

A refuelling contract that only covers weekdays, so the generator runs dry late on a Saturday night during load-shedding. A peak-season haulier booked off a load board at nine at night with nobody checking the reefer set point. A racking repair deferred for another budget year. Sixty agency pickers put to work in December before anyone saw what the agency had trained them on. A guard at the gate who does not know who to call when an unannounced auditor arrives before seven in the morning. Those are management decisions, and the Standard treats them that way.

BRCGS Storage and Distribution Issue 4 for Management is a four-hour course for directors, owners and senior managers of storage, logistics, cold chain, distribution, wholesale and cross-dock businesses. It explains what the Global Standard for Storage and Distribution, Issue 4, expects of senior management personally, how to decide what your certificate should cover, how the sites, fleets, systems and contracts you pay for are judged, how an audit is graded, and how a certificate is won and kept when at least one audit in three arrives unannounced.

What the course covers

Five modules: the Standard and what it expects of management; senior management commitment, culture and the management system; site, people and contractors; operations, temperature, transport, incidents and recall; and the audit protocol, grading and keeping the certificate.

Every module ends with a worked case study from a fictional South African logistics business, a knowledge check and a scenario game built on decisions a manager actually faces: what to put in scope, which haulier to approve and on what evidence, what to do when a cold store fails overnight, 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 Storage and Distribution, Issue 4, 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 site. If you are new to the Standard, our Introduction to BRCGS Storage and Distribution Issue 4 course walks through the requirements for supervisors and floor teams; this course builds on it for the people who make the decisions.