Cool Runnings

How a blend of team working, SMED disciplines and management tenacity is helping Geest to retain pole position in the chilled food race.

The achievements of Geest Plc, both financially and in terms of securing market share, are the more remarkable for being won in territory where others fear to tread. The UK retail market for chilled fresh and prepared foods is one where exemplary quality, delivery performance and a commitment to reducing costs is a base entry requirement. Here, shelf life has a very precise and literal meaning. It's the time customers expect fresh goods to be on sale on their shelves - not lingering in supplier's factories or despatch bays. Manufacturing agility must be the key- inventories are not an option.

Geest attribute their success to strong corporate values, emphasising customer care and a can do approach, combined with considerable autonomy for their manufacturing business units. There are 34 of these, producing anything from soups to sushi; pizzas to prepared salads.

At Recipe Dish, Spalding, they make an innovative range of ready meals combining fresh and cooked ingredients. The three process stages: cooking, filling and packing demand the very highest standards of hygiene in the food business.

Keen to further enhance their capacity, throughput and efficiency, Recipe Dish called on manufacturing consultants, Forward Vision to examine current activity and launch an improvement project. Attention was soon focused on the filling process, a labour-intensive activity undertaken on four filling lines. Unemployment around Spalding is less than one per cent. Attracting high calibre production staff is difficult. Agency staff- some bussed in from as far afield as Rotherham, seventy miles away - make up to 20% of the workforce. Turnover among them is high compared to Geest's permanent staff. Reducing this dependency would reap great benefits. On the filling lines, downtime amounted to 45% of available production. Of this, 75% was attributed to product changes. Fifteen minutes precisely were invariably recorded for each of these.

After familiarising section managers and key technical staff with both the essential disciplines of lean manufacturing and with the opportunities that were apparent from the diagnosis, Forward Vision then issued supervisors and team leaders with stopwatches and provided training in their correct use. Forced briefly from their customary fire fighting roles and required instead to observe what was actually happening during a line change, they realised that the ubiquitous 15 minutes recorded for changing over was optimistic. Reality was an average of 18 minutes and sometimes considerably longer. What really struck home was how disorganised the changeovers were. Many agency staff were uncertain of their role during changeovers. Others queued at sinks with buckets. It was difficult to move equipment around the floor and some items of equipment had particularly difficult areas to access for cleaning. "Everybody was running around like headless chickens," observes Jane Haines, one of the team leaders at Recipe Dish.

Forward Vision's Ian Scurfield now demonstrated how SMED principles are equally valuable for labour intensive processes. Modest investment provided wheels and quick release couplings for equipment and workbenches, and relocation of the water supply. A small changeover team was established. Changeover cards guaranteed that even new starters would know their precise role in shifting from chicken fajitas to jambalaya; from lasagne to mushroom biryani. Within days, the first eight-minute changeover was achieved.

Now came the difficult part: establishing the methods and disciplines needed to secure an eight-minute changeover every time. Ian Scurfield worked persistently each of three shifts, coaching team leaders; standardising and refining the new methods. "The whole thing was like a mammoth plate-spinning exercise. As soon as I focused my attention on a new shift I'd find that progress made with previous shifts was being eroded - especially with the constant flux of agency staff." Geest's management team was impressed by the Forward Vision approach. "I have worked with consultants in before," recalls Alec Paterson, Manufacturing Manager at Recipe Dish "but this sleeves-rolled, hands-on style has been a new and refreshing experience.

Nevertheless, the project almost stalled half way through this consolidation phase and it was to take a practical demonstration of Geest's can do values to keep it on course. The commitment of team leaders was affecting their more reactive tasks. Changeover benefits had not yet contributed and production volume was being incrementally lost. A watershed was reached when it became apparent that Recipe Dish was likely to fail its delivery obligations in one particular week unless it was prepared to withdraw team leaders from the project.

Alec Paterson faced an acute dilemma. "I was most reluctant to interrupt the project. I knew that if we did so we might never be able to rekindle it again." Yet for a Geest company to wilfully jeopardise supply to its customers was wholly inconceivable. After some debate among the Section Managers at Recipe Dish, a decision was finally reached. Supported by some of the technical staff, the managers themselves manned 2 filling line for eight hours on a Saturday morning to make up the anticipated shortfall of 2,000 cases. The project continued. Within ten days, Recipe Dish had achieved and was sustaining changeovers averaging less than eight minutes across all three shifts. Since then, Geest's team leaders have managed to squeeze changeover times even further: hitting averages as low as six minutes at the time of writing.

Alec Paterson identifies other project benefits: "Daily production reviews are now a more factual affair. A single sheet tells where we are, where we're going and how we're going to get there. Problem solving is more structured and numbers oriented. Proposed solutions are backed-up by figures. Our culture has shifted. To we're good at what we do has been added we still have to learn. " Geest are resolved to invest in that learning. Supervisors from Recipe Dish and sister business units are currently partaking of a bespoke version of Forward Vision's Manufacturing Management Programme. The goal is to enable a critical mass of key Geest staff to become practically familiar with the same techniques and disciplines that have made the SMED project a success.

Costed purely in terms of labour efficiency, SMED has made a significant cost saving. But the real benefits are the potential for more capacity and shorter throughput time. The goal at Recipe Dish is to produce each of their 57 products daily: giving Geest's customers even swifter and more responsive deliveries and extended product shelf life. This requires additional upstream capacity. Forward Vision return to Recipe Dish next month when SMED resumes in earnest. The team leaders and members of the Cooking Section are keen to show what they can do.