Process improvement failures down to poor Board-level support

New research conducted across food manufacturing plants in the US and Europe has shown that the biggest barriers to companies making operational improvements is not related to technology or equipment but the resistance of senior managers, together with a failure to focus on profitability goals of making plant changes.

Reporting on the results of two separate studies at a round table debate last week on Keeping food production profitable​, organised by CDC Factory, which supplies packaged manufacturing operations management systems for food and beverage makers, president of the company Mark Sutcliffe said: “They can’t get people on the executive Board to listen to anything new because they have heard it all before.”

And without buy-in for operational improvement projects from the top, success was unlikely, he claimed. “You already know most of the problems, execution is the issue,” he claimed. “It’s all about people - behavioural change - but most of the projects people are involved with are about equipment.”

Sutcliffe said: “The biggest failure factor is not aligning operational projects to shareholder and market priorities.”

He presented the findings from a food industry benchmarking study conducted by CDC Factory, which assessed the performance and predictors of performance across over 150 companies. He also described the key findings from AMR Research’s recent assessment of key performance indicators and operational metrics in the food industry covering over 400 companies in Europe and North America.

Sutcliffe argued that a “hearts and minds” operation was needed to get the buy-in of senior management for the tools and techniques that were being used at middle management level, which were “looking at odds with what the senior managers were interested in”. The problem was compounded, he added, by the myriad of different terms used to describe methodologies and tools for continuous improvement. However, there was also resistance to change from some middle managers, he added.

Rather than the many three-letter acronyms used to describe different approaches, just one was needed, he added: WAC - what’s appropriate counts - to truly empower the shopfloor workforce to bring about the improvements required. “Performance follows good practice,” argued Sutcliffe, “and you don’t have to do much to get the ball rolling.”