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KATH SMITH, MANUFACTURING SUPPORT MANAGER, WALKERS SNACK FOODS, SKELMERSDALE

There are no 'typical' days for me at the moment. The only part of the job that's routine is the tea-round at about 7.15am when the early birds are in.

That's because we're not actually in production yet here at Skelmersdale. This is the old snack factory site, which Walkers bought as vacant in 2002. So we're in a start-up situation.

When I first came here in October all the old equipment had been shipped out. It was just a big, rather grubby, empty space. Since then everyone has been mucking in to ensure we start full production on March 20. That's our 'go live' date, so it has been quite a short time-scale.

Our first production line is one we're transferring over from our Walkers' site in Swansea, which is closing down. It's an extruded snack line that makes Monster Munch, Wotsits, Chipsticks and Frazzles.

My role here is manufacturing support manager. We have a site leader; an operations manager, who all the production staff report to; a technical manager who looks after the more engineering-based staff; a human resources manager; and I look after everything else, which includes handling most of the site's financial information and a lot of the things that help make a site successful, like the canteen and the laundry.

The manufacturing support team also has responsibility for the quality agenda. As this is a start-up there has been a lot of work to do on quality and food safety, making sure we've got the right systems and controls in place to match the standards we have across the rest of our business. We're not reinventing the wheel, it's just a case of taking systems and processes from other sites and making sure they work at Skelmersdale.

There's an initiative in Walkers called Star Fleet that's about sharing best practice to help people work as effectively as possible. It's been going for a few years now, and has been really popular in other sites, for example, through 'raising the game' initiatives that encourage individual performance improvement. In a start-up like Skelmersdale, we have an opportunity to create that best-practice environment from day one.

We are being fairly blatant about stealing ideas from elsewhere in the business so that we can introduce new employees to best practice at the very beginning. Doing a complete factory start-up is a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When you start work in a new place you normally ask all those 'how does this happen?' or 'how does that work?' questions. In a start-up you quickly find you've got to decide those things yourself - even daft things like hairnets. It's a given that you need to wear them, but in Walkers we also need to make sure they're changed every day. So should we go with different colours to 'force' that change?

Another is to determine which contracts people go on to and what hours they are going to work. What are your communications processes going to be? What will your team meetings look like? We spent a day off-site with four front-line managers to work through a lot of that stuff.

My first job when I arrived was to write the manufacturing support annual operating plan - referred to as the AOP. Every function in our business has to write and work to an AOP. Since then I've had a real variety of work to do: for example, setting up laundry contracts, hygiene consumables and personal protective equipment (PPE).

We've been flat out with recruitment too. I've been taking half-days out to interview for the front-line teams as well as for my own team of seven. In manufacturing support I've got two cost technicians, a person responsible for raw materials and production planning, a couple of administrators and then a quality systems specialist and a food safety expert.

We expect to have 110 people on site when we go live in March and they'll all be new to the Walkers business. There's a huge amount of operator training to be done and we won't have a line to train them on at first because it's still being installed, so we're getting support on training from our other sites in Lincoln, Leicester and Coventry.

Once the line is in, manufacturing technicians from Swansea will come over to help get Skelmersdale up and running. Swansea was at the forefront of the Star Fleet initiative and the team there has given us fantastic support in a difficult situation.

Another key area of my work has been getting the back-office systems set up, which primarily involves IT. Walkers already has good systems but, of course, Skelmersdale didn't previously exist as part of those. The one that has given us most headaches is our MP2 preventative maintenance system. In theory we can just lift all the production line information from Swansea into Skelmersdale but there were a number of additional assets we'd bought with this site that the system didn't recognise. It was all on a PC here but there were little problems - like we couldn't find the password! In the end one of our IT guys hacked into the PC to retrieve that information.

We've also had to get the IT infrastructure on site, like high-speed lines to enable us to access Walkers' central servers. We need all those systems in place from early February to give us a bit of breathing space before we go live.

My role is great because it's so varied. Although the financial aspect is a huge chunk of it, it's also closely linked to production. My team are responsible for performance information and to provide that you've got to understand the operation. That suits me because I thrive best in a fast-paced production environment. I did a spell with 3M as a training and development manager, which was great experience but took me too far out of the day-to-day pace of operations.

We've got our first year financial plan in place now. As we become operational the emphasis will shift to managing those costs and making sure my team are delivering the information needed by the various functions.

For example, we obviously provide weekly cost reports to head office, but how do we also report that information to the factory in a way they can actually use? There's no point in reporting for reporting's sake.

Part of the job now is helping the operational guys know what they want. What information do they want included on scorecards? What performance data do they need to give their teams? What level of detail do they need? Do we need to break the information down further so they can identify the problems they need to fix?

We've been working to a pretty tight time-scale, but we expect to be running close to full efficiency almost from day one. We're using the same kit that exists in other manufacturing sites and we've got a huge amount of resource to support the commissioning. So there's no reason we shouldn't be running at the same efficiency levels as the others.

INTERVIEW BY MICK WHITWORTH

FACTORY FACTS

Location:​ Walkers Snack Foods, Pennine Place, Skelmersdale, WN8 9QF. Tel: 01695 50230

Site size:​ 23 acres

Employees:​ 110 in March, rising to 200 by August

Initial products:​ Monster Munch, Wotsits, Chipsticks and Frazzles

Projected throughput:​ 4,500t a year on the first line, increasing to 8,000t-plus from August when a second line is due to go live

PERSONAL

Name:​ Kathryn Smith

Age:​ 34

Career highlights:​ Graduated from Cardiff as an industrial chemist and joined 3M, spending eight years in process improvement, supervisory and training and development roles. Joined Walkers in 2001, working in warehousing and logistics, front line and operations support roles. Moved to Skelmersdale in October 2005

Domestics:​ Married to Dave, who works for 3M in Clitheroe. They live in the Ribble Valley. Their first child, Iwan, was born in 2004

Outside work:​ "At the moment? Nothing except looking after my son! I like to run - I did the London Marathon in 2001 and 2002 - but it's mainly 10km races. I stretched to the Cardiff half-marathon in October. But it was tough."