Logistics Case Study

Food Cold Storage & Logistics

Technical Environment: Food Industry Storage and Logistics
Context:

Our Client’s customers are established world class food manufacturers in Ireland’s growing and high demanding market. The well established storage and logistics hubs are based in 3 locations within 1 hr of Dublin’s ports. The Company established in 1994 has an extremely high representation for service quality and distributes to prominent cities all over the world including the Far East as well as leading food service outlets. They represent a critical market with expectations of high quality at competitive prices. The food storage and distribution business is mainly frozen with some chilled and ambient products. Blast freezing is a speciality bringing the temperature of products down to - 18°C in less than 20hrs. The warehouses have unused capacity and currently operate about 70% of the available 30k pallet spaces. Customer service, responsiveness and highest quality at competitive prices are all critical success factors. In particular costs were rising disproportionately with market expectations and Tecknic’s 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 operations and service transactions
• Management of cross-functional project teams
• Operations excellence support
• Manage all stakeholder relationships

Objectives:
• Target major customer orders E2E processes and warehouse wide saving
• Improve productivity and performance indicators (KPI’s)
• Implement Lean Sigma and TOC 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 largest Warehouse with consolidated admin
• Reduced energy
• Transferred knowledge and built a sustainable continuous improvement programme (CIP)
• Improved staff engagement with process innovation plans, managed risks and change
• Training & Development programme for staff
• Annual Cost savings €250k
• ROI 5:1.