Food Processing

Technical Environment: Food processing Industry

Context:

Our Client’s customers include some of China’s established catering outlets in prominent cities all over the world including London’s China town as well as leading retail outlets. They represent a critical market with expectations of high quality at competitive prices.  The food processing business is mainly frozen with fresh product making up roughly 20% and a range of specialities is delivered direct to large retail outlets. The processing plant has additional capacity and currently operates on just 3 days per week. Low lead times, responsiveness, highest quality at competitive prices are all critical success factors. In particular costs were rising disproportionately with market expectations and my intervention was essentially to set up a continuous improvement programme and to Project manage a substantial reduction in operations costs.  Failure to achieve a lower cost base for operations was beginning to pose risks to competitiveness and action was urgently required. Project management expertise was an essential prerequisite coupled with knowledge and understanding of Operations Excellence, Lean thinking and Change management

Responsibilities:

  • CI establishment & programme management, training & development, facilitate change

  • Project management, planning and communication using MS Project & Visio

  • Lean process improvement in manufacturing and service transactions

  • Management of cross-functional project teams

  • Operations excellence support

  • Manage all stakeholder relationships

Objectives:

  • Target a €1M plant wide saving

  • Improve productivity and service key performance indicators (KPI’s)

  • Implement Lean process improvement programme  

  • Transfer knowledge and build a sustainable continuous improvement programme (CIP)

  • Improve staff engagement with process innovation plans, manage change

  • Find and remove process bottlenecks, raise productivity

  • Return on project investment (ROI) greater than 3:1 of project costs          

Achievements:

  • Reduced direct and indirect employee costs and improved productivity in the processing plant

  • Reduced energy and input material costs 

  • Transferred knowledge and built a sustainable continuous improvement programme (CIP)

  • Improved staff engagement with process & product innovation plans, managed sustainable change

  • Training & Development programme for staff

  • Annual Cost savings €0.75M

  • ROI 6:1

Phase 1 of the project was referenced in the Sunday Times:

‘…  Rising costs were still an issue, so the Steeles called in the professionals in the form of advisor David Harkin. "We thought we were doing all we could, but he helped us save €350,000 already in one area and is now looking at another," said Stuart. "This is all with no sacrifice in quality. “…

Stuart Steele, MD and Owner.