Dream bean team

Jaap Wilbers, vice president, supply chain, Heinz Kitt Green​

I've run a lot of factories over the years in many different countries but it doesn't matter who you are, or where you come from, people will always be sceptical to start with until they see what you do. It's nothing personal.

When I got here [February 2009] I didn't march in with a long list of things I wanted to change in the first week. But after three months of working with the senior team, we had about 80% of the plan developed for what we wanted to do to take this site to where we really thought it could go although of course the plan will evolve.

The challenge is not actually driving change, but really sustaining it and the only way we can do that is by getting all 1,400 people that work here behind what we're doing, not a handful of people in the management team. We don't want everyone else to leave their brains at the entrance when they come in.

It's still early days, but the continuous improvement (CI) work we're doing in can-making and beans production has already delivered some impressive results on every key performance indicator, from performance to plan to percentage of products that are right first time and customer service levels.

We've also reduced finished goods stock by 10% in the last nine months without damaging service levels through working more closely with trading partners up and down the supply chain. Ultimately we are moving towards a just-in-time system with some suppliers by sharing much more information with them.

But the biggest change on the ground after rolling out CI programmes in beans and soup is that machine availability and reliability has increased to such an extent that we're not working weekends anymore. We used to have temporary staff working here most weekends on beans and about 20 weekends a year on soup, whereas now, they are effectively 24/5 operations, which means we can use the weekends for preventative maintenance. We're also more flexible.

One part of our CI programme in beans has been rolling out reliability centred maintenance (RCM) across our rotary blanchers [which pre-cook the beans before they are filled into cans]. This has really increased their reliability. But while RCM is a sexy topic, it's not something you can implement in isolation or do from scratch and expect results. It only works when you have already got something to build on. The culture has to be right.

A key part of this is increasing the sense of ownership among front line operators and getting rid of the 'I operate, you fix' mentality. The blame culture only starts to go when you start to see issues as shared problems or challenges instead of arguing over which department to allocate unplanned downtime to. It's all about team-based ownership.

To get everyone more involved, we've made things more visual, demonstrating what things should look like when they are working optimally, how to set up a machine or how to inspect and clean it, through pictures and single point lessons. 90% of these are written by the operators themselves and are in a reference library stuck on the wall next to the equipment or on the machines themselves.

We've also got a very simple colour-coding system on wipeboards by all the lines with short interval control charts. Every hour, you can see at a glance where you are against the target. If it is met, there is a green dot, if not, there is a red dot and a note explaining why. If a machine is down for more than three minutes, the operators record the source of the problem, the information is uploaded to our database, patterns are spotted and we can do something about it.

A big priority has been getting things out of the office and onto the lines. Targets should be communicated and visible to everyone. This also applies to the management team. One of the things we have done recently is shift our morning meetings out of the office into the corridor so everyone can see us and hear us.

I haven't come in and changed everything; there were lots of fantastic things going on here long before I arrived. My job is to ensure that what is currently best practice in certain parts of the site becomes standard practice right across the site.

The same applies at group level. For example, there is a lot of work going on via the Heinz Global Performance System to share best practice and set out standardised ways to measure things from overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to service levels. But we also take things that have worked well in other plants and implement them here our daily corridor meeting idea came from the Elst factory in the Netherlands. We've also learned a lot from the Kendall factory about the best way to dispense spices and other raw materials.

This is the largest food processing facility in Europe, making baked beans, soup, pasta and other products. We also make our own cans. Today, we have around 263 stock keeping units, although the 80:20 rule applies.

Soup production is more labour intensive because of the preparation involved cutting and dicing potatoes and so on but beans production is more automated. We sort and clean the beans, which come from the US and Canada, blanch them, fill them into cans, add tomato sauce, seal them, sterilise them, label and shrinkwrap them and load them onto pallets or wheeled merchandising units.

The Queen and the beanstalk​

There was a big investment in the Snap Pots production line for producing beans in microwaveable pots before I arrived, but since my arrival we have also invested quite heavily in automation in packing, with a robotic palletising line that was opened by the Queen in May to celebrate the site's 50th anniversary.

We spent hours getting ready for her visit we even had a few rehearsals where my assistant pretended to be the Queen so that everyone knew what to do! It took a lot of preparation, but this was mostly ensuring that the timing all went to plan.

As a site, we've developed stretching targets in terms of conversion costs per tonne, customer service levels, OEE and inventory levels and we have a zero tolerance approach to waste, accidents, quality and service defects. But in a more strategic sense, we are aiming to be the supplier of preference, the workplace of choice and consistently excellent in our performance. We call this 'true north', as it's a goal or target that doesn't change.

It's a cliché, but the only way to achieve this is to engage all stakeholders. While we always talk about empowering people on the shopfloor, over my career, I've actually found that where you are trying to change the culture, the people that sometimes struggle the most can be the managers.

And that applies to me as well. I grew up with the top-down model, where the management tells the team what to do. But there comes a point when you understand that this model doesn't work; you realise that you are running the factory yourself and that without you, everything could fall apart.

Today, I sleep well at night. And when I go on holiday, I don't worry about work because I have a team I can rely on. But you also need to build in what I call headspace on a day-to-day basis as well. Setting aside time when you can think strategically about the business is very important. For me, 7.30-9am is my thinking time, so that's when it's best to leave me alone!

INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON ​