validus management consultancy UK

Food & Drinks Case Study

Bottle supplier


Performance and profit improvement
across a multi-site food group

THE ORGANISATION

A major division of a market-leading UK food group with 25 sites
  • A divisional turnover of around £1billion
  • Highly mature and competitive market
  • Low margin product
  • Supplying major supermarket chains in the UK

THE ISSUES / PROBLEMS

  • Despite major internal efforts, flat divisional performance graphs
  • An internal team identified an approximate £16million improvement opportunity across the division, but needed external help to detail this and develop a recovery plan
  • Plants plagued by poor availability, leading to supply issues and lost OEE
  • A lack of effective opportunity identification within the business
  • Poor problem solving skills
  • Difficulty at an executive level understanding the current opportunities and tracking the benefit recovery

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

  • Carried out detailed assessments of all 25 sites
  • Developed an integrated Value Improvement Tool, to show where the opportunities lay within the business and which sites to target first
  • Carried out executive workshops to introduce: the full suite of improvement tools; the approach used to value improvement opportunities across all sites; and to gain executive commitment
  • Carried out site management workshops at each of the 25 sites to introduce the Value Improvement toolkit
  • Conducted improvement valuation workshops, coaching each site team in the construction of the detailed valuation tool for their own individual site
  • Provided individual site support through a series of 4-month programs to enable sites to rapidly recover the improvement opportunities
  • Developed a divisional capacity tool linked to improvement tracking to identify spare capacity within the network of plants as the sites improved
  • Project management of the recovery programme, in partnership with the client management team

PROJECT RESULTS

  • Identified of in excess of £50million (additional £36m) in opportunity for improvement
  • Implemented site recovery programs with paybacks in excess of 6:1
  • Effective skills transfer in the construction, application and use of the value improvement toolkits (The most mature of the site support programs achieved half of the value improvement after project completion)
  • The priority issue of availability was solved during the pilot programme. Solutions were subsequently transferred to all the other sites within the group, which also suffered from the same issue