Poor maintenance and skills are killing efficiency

UK food processing efficiency is hampered by a lack of joined up thinking, lack of skilled staff and poor maintenance standards.

That's the verdict of MCP Consulting and Training, accredited by the National Skills Academy for Food and Drink Manufacturing as a champion for engineering maintenance.

"Often we propose introducing a process to bring project engineers, maintenance and operations staff together," said Peter Gagg, md of Solihull-based MCP. "People work in silos." He said different departments could often point out flaws in equipment before decisions were made.

Securing adequately trained and experienced staff to work on engineering systems was equally important, he said. "How can you get good performance out of people if very few understand the basics? There's a good correlation between training scores and overall manufacturing performance."

Outsourcing might seem attractive, but often external personnel didn't have a firm's best interests at heart and took longer to address problems when machines broke down.

He added: "Lean manufacturing requires firms to maintain the reliability of their equipment. Many have not seen lean deliver because they have ignored this."