Here at last
Two employees at bakery and chilled foods manufacturer Kensey Foods have become the first in the UK to be awarded the new Proficiency in Food Manufacturing Excellence qualification developed by Improve, the food and drink sector skills council.
Designed to boost productivity and efficiency across a business through continuous improvement of staff skills, the new qualification incorporates elements of lean manufacturing. And its award to shift manager Nick Toulson and team leader Martin Robinson marks the coming of age of lean manufacturing in Britain's food and drink industry.
And not before time. Now, perhaps, at long last we can start to use the lean tool-box, to make the humble BLT the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich as efficiently as we can make the BMW.
Certainly there has been an upsurge in lean manufacturing and its techniques in the food and drink industry over the past few years, says Jonathan Cooper, skills consultant with the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink Manufacturing (NSA), part of Improve. The NSA delivers lean solutions to food companies.
"Lean can be applied to any organisation," says Cooper. "Improving performance and profitability is as relevant to a small business as it is to a large multinational." But more than tools and techniques, lean is about changing behaviour, says Cooper. "It encourages people to see themselves as part of the business and to make their contribution to the bottom line within their sphere of influence."
Carl Tomlinson, principal consultant at The Manufacturing Institute, says one reason the take-up of lean by food manufacturers is accelerating has been the ability to take the lean concepts developed by the automotive industry for discrete manufacturing and apply them to food manufacturing, which is generally batch orientated.
But he warns: "Lean is not an end in itself. People like Toyota and the other bastions of lean have been perfecting their production lines for decades. And so, while you can get some extraordinary results from some individual change activities, what is important is that it is sustained over the long term at every level."
And that relies on a change in behaviour as well as the adoption of the techniques, says Tomlinson. "The best lean firms have a culture of seeking to expose problems and then challenging those employees involved to solve them literally forcing people to experiment to see what happens and what problems come up. This drives both business improvement and personal development."
Going lean
So how do you start going lean? One of the best ways is to look at someone who is already doing it, such as chilled foods firm Greencore (pictured on these pages), which has made extensive use of lean manufacturing techniques to improve its operational effectiveness.
Other firms are looking outside the food and drink sector. Tomlinson says: "Some of the large food companies are building relations with some of the automotive companies, because they know they are the best at it."
But what exactly do we mean by lean? If you ask 10 different people you will get 10 different answers, says Tom Wedgwood, director of Newton, manufacturing efficiency improvement specialist. "In the classic automotive sense, lean means single piece flow, and very low accumulation (buffer stocks). The problem is that if you apply that to industries such as food, it can create problems as you go to smaller and smaller product runs with more and more changeovers.
"And pulling out the accumulation can cause problems with smaller runs. But if we take the broader definition of reducing waste material waste and time waste then lean can have a fairly big impact on both of those."
"We do a lot of lean work with ready meal companies. Typically in ready meals we are talking about a 2025% increase in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and that gives you about a 20% reduction in labour costs. A typical ready meal company will have 58% waste. You can reduce that by about 40%."
But apart from the hard bottom-line benefits, there's a major cultural benefit, according to Wedgwood. "If you are involved in an organisation where you are proud of the systems and processes, that can have a huge impact on staff morale and staff retention."
Everyone says that they do lean and everyone has some people doing some bits of lean, says Ivan Bascle, partner in the Munich office of Boston Consulting Group (BCG). "But they don't attack the core of the inefficiencies. Do we really understand the changeover so that we can get a 10-minute changeover or less? Can we combine some production lines and therefore save a lot on line manning? Those kind of things are still not very well managed in food companies."
Bascle is a co-author of BCG's recent report on Lean food and beverage manufacturing, which concluded that lean manufacturing remains under used in the food industry.
"There seems to be less emphasis on lean, compared with highly capital intensive companies. Typically these would have very high capital expenditure on machinery and therefore would need to make sure that their whole supply chain was working extremely well. But because food is local and there are many more recipes, there is less standardisation and more complexity and therefore, typically, more people, more line manning, and lower lean efficiency."
Just-in-time
But lean manufacturing offers the food and drink industry a big opportunity to produce better, fresher products at less cost, says Bascle. Just cutting the changeover time on a production line, for example, from three hours to 20 minutes, means you can produce the same number of products but in much smaller batches. "You can produce much more 'just-in-time' and therefore be able to have fresher products on the shelf that are more delicious and better tasting."
But you only get results out of lean if you go through a huge number of very small initiatives, warns Bascle. "Our approach is to leave no stone unturned. Typically when we go into a factory we have around 100 initiatives. Many of them only save $20,000 each, but if you multiply that by 100 you get $25M in a given plant."
The structure of the food industry in the UK is very different from anywhere else in the world because of the dominance of own-label manufacture and the influence of the retailers, says Mike Dudbridge, principal lecturer in food manufacture, National Centre for Food Manufacture, University of Lincoln.
"In the UK the retailers are the bosses, so food manufacturers don't feel as though they are in control of their own destiny," says Dudbridge. "But having said that, it has become very apparent that the retailers have begun looking for high-performing suppliers. And a lot of food companies have recognised that implementing lean manufacturing techniques in their factories helps them to have high performance at a low cost.
"One major retailer I spoke to recently is encouraging its manufacturers and its supply base to push harder on lean manufacturing. It is not necessarily because of the cost advantages, although there should be some in most lean implementations, but because they see it as a mechanism to get to high performance in terms of product quality and consistency, and delivery performance.
"The major retailers are not normally far behind each other so I'm guessing that most retailers are now talking to their supply base to push harder with lean systems.
"Lean is about one-touch manufacture. When you start a product in manufacture it shouldn't stop moving until it's sitting in the despatch warehouse. Once you pick a product up you don't put it down again until it is complete. You eliminate work-in-progress in the factory and you eliminate interim storage of things in your factory (such as buffer stocks, accumulation, etc)."
Protecting jobs
One problem, suggests Dudbridge, is that lean is perceived as robotics and automation. "It can be, if that is the most efficient way of doing things," he says. "But lean it is really about growing the business, making the business more efficient so that it can sell more and therefore protect the jobs of the people rather than put them at risk. Lean protects jobs rather than threatens jobs."
The problem is knowing when you need to go lean. When you live and breathe the operation you've got, then what you are doing in your factory will be normal and acceptable, says Dudbridge. "So talk to your new recruits. They will come into your business with a clean sheet of paper and a fresh pair of eyes. They are yet to get moulded into your way of doing things, so you can get all sorts of hints from them as to where to improve."
Dudbridge has a book coming out in April called Lean Manufacturing for the Food Industry. Published by Wiley-Blackwell it is intended as a handbook for shopfloor people, he says. "It is not a theoretical book. It is a readable, practical guide to the implementation of lean ideas in your factory.
"The people I have in mind are team leaders, supervisors, shift managers. The book is aimed at supporting them to give them ideas of where to look for possible solutions and to give them some structure to the way they should think about lean and the way to do things.
"There's a major section on performance measurement how to go about measuring the performance of your manufacturing operation. It is the key first step really. The rest of the book is a basic run-through of the major lean techniques and how they can be applied in the food industry.
"Over the years I've come across companies who make a big announcement that they are going to go lean. The problem is this usually means that the people on the factory floor get lean done to them. But lean is a bottom-up approach. It is a motivational thing as well as being the application of techniques."
Dudbridge concludes by saying: "The book is aimed at helping people who are having lean done to them by explaining some of the background to lean and what the senior management might be looking for but perhaps not explaining it very well."
KEY CONTACTS
Boston Consulting Group 020 7753 5353
Improve 0845 644 0448
Manufacturing Institute 0161 875 2462
National Skills Academy 0845 644 0558
Newton 01684 576477
University of Lincoln 01406 493 000
