Hale & pace

I love my job. It probably sounds a bit sad, but it's what I've always wanted to do. I moved into this role two years ago, and one of the key things for me from the start was engaging staff right across the business to support the drive for continuous improvement, because the leadership team can't do everything.

I've always believed that the best-placed people to make improvements, whether you're talking about efficiency, safety or anything else, are the people doing the tasks.

I've been working in industry for 30 years, and I've seen lots of change, but again and again, it's the team leaders and supervisors that get forgotten. We have these incredibly high expectations of them and yet they're not kept informed or trained on new skills to support improvements.

So our first line management programme, which covers all three Campbell's UK sites, tries to make sure that we help, support, coach and guide our teams so that they keep learning and take that knowledge back into the business.

For me, encouraging teams to come up with their own solutions is key.

For example, on one of our meat lines, strong sales increased product demand. We explained the situation to the team and they created a 7.5% increase in output through gradually speeding up the line. They have also come up with some great ways of improving ingredient yields through reduced wastage.

There's also a team, led by a line manager, looking at reducing changeover times and sequencing products. A changeover on one packaging line used to take two and a half hours. Now it takes 20 minutes.

The same approach has really worked on health and safety too. The teams here have driven a 36% year-on-year reduction in minor accidents using a programme called behavioural-based safety to support the improvement.

This basically involves training people to observe one another doing tasks and give feedback about whether the task was done safely or not. It's not about catching people out; it's about helping to identify opportunities to do the tasks on a shift safely. We currently have 50 observers, delivering over 200 observations a month. My goal is to have everyone on site trained as a safety observer so we are all watching out for one another.

This approach has worked so well that we're now rolling it out to a quality-based programme as well, so rather than having audits for audits' sake, it's a continual day-to-day process.

Do I lose sleep at night worrying about the job? No! I've got a fantastic team here that's fully engaged and knows what's required. But external factors outside my control like energy prices do cause concern.

We've seen a massive rise in utility bills this year. But again, I've had really good support from the folks in the plant in terms of driving improvement and energy conservation to offset a fair chunk of the increase.

It's all about small things: looking at changeovers so you use less equipment; making sure machinery isn't left running; looking at the points of usage; and making sure that you haven't got any leaks or lights left on.

We were doing a lot of this before, but the recent drive has heightened awareness. It soon becomes infectious once a team of people starts focusing on it, they get some results, and then they go back and start challenging everything else.

Water is the same. Years ago, if you walked around a cannery, the floors were wet and everything went down the drain. Not any more. Today, we've got teams looking at everything from making sure that boiler condensate is recycled, to looking at recycling and re-cleaning cooling water.

In terms of how we control and drive our performance, we use TPM (total productive maintenance) and have also recently started using the six sigma approach.

Underpinning this we have a programme used throughout Campbell's called TDC, or total delivered cost, which is about looking at the whole supply chain to identify the right improvement opportunities.

In the past, many factory units just looked at their costs of manufacture, whereas now, we look at everything from purchase costs to storage costs. If you overproduce to drive a saving in manufacturing, for example, it can hike up storage costs, which overall, might be more inefficient. Once you start looking at the total picture, the economics often start to change.

But TDC is also about thinking about things in a different way. Waste, for example, comes in many guises, including the cost of wasting people's time if they are expecting a delivery that doesn't turn up on time.

At King's Lynn, we've bolted on to TDC a programme called cost deployment that pulls out the segments of cost and then breaks them down and apportions them to the elements of spend. We can then look at these and see where the big opportunities are, in areas such as yield control and yield wastage. We're also targeting a 15% year-on-year reduction in terms of complaints per million.

To measure our improvements we use our cost measures and key performance indicators along with a world class manufacturing audit programme.

The actual process of making soup in a factory is pretty much what you'd do at home in the kitchen -- just on a far larger scale. We start with the ingredients: flour, vegetables and so on. These are inspected and weighed, and we prepare any pre mixes, emulsions and purees. We then blend the ingredients; fill and seal the cans; sterilise, label and pack them.

Lots of things have changed since the plant opened in 1959 though. We used to do all the butchery and vegetable preparation here: up until about 10 years ago we would still have been steam peeling, dicing and preparing our own potatoes, carrots and onions for example. But now it all comes pre-prepared so that we can use our resources more efficiently.

Whilst things have changed over time, this is still a pretty labour intensive part of the operation because we are still decanting all the raw materials as they come in and ensuring quality control.

We only store about 24 hours' worth of materials on site: ingredients, packaging materials, cans and so on. They are all on an inventory control system and are issued out into the factory to go through our various processes. They then move on to six preparation and five packing lines. We also have a bank of sterilisation retorts for the pies and puddings -- basically giant pressure cookers, and two hydrostatic cookers for the soups and sauces.

We're a five-day, 24-hour canning operation working three eight-hour shifts, which makes us very flexible. A key factor in this has been improving communications between sales and operations, which has helped us keep stock at a level to meet sales forecasts. However, we are able to ramp up production to meet sales opportunities that come through at short notice.

We also have the flexibility to meet changing customer demands. If a retailer comes along wanting say, a chunkier veg soup with meat, we just fill the cans in two phases with a meat and vegetable mix and then a sauce top off. It's exactly the same way that we do pies and puddings that are component-filled.

We continue to invest in the plant and replace equipment as and when required for current processes. But there hasn't been any radically new must-have technology launched into the soup industry recently, so it's all about ongoing investment.

I'm proud of what we've achieved here at King's Lynn. Our service levels are very good, safety awareness is high and we've seen improvements in our critical KPIs (key performance indicators).

My biggest challenge for the future is to keep the momentum going, to explain to the team here that we're operating in a very competitive environment and that's not going to change.

We need to continue getting everyone involved in our improvement programmes and keep on working smarter.

INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON

FACTORY

Location:​ Hardwick Road, King's Lynn, Norfolk, PE30 4HS. Tel: 01553 615 000

Size:​ Buildings (including factory) take up nine acres of 30-acre site

Employees:​ 320 over three shifts, including support staff (HR, finance, IT, customer service, purchasing etc)

Output:​ About 6.5M cases a year

Products:​ Campbell's soups, Fray Bentos pies and puddings, Homepride cook-in sauces, Granny's soups, Campbell's meatballs, retailer own-label soups. 173 stock keeping units

PERSONAL

Name:​ Ian Hale

Age:​ 48

Career highlights:​ Worked at Coca-Cola for 10 years in a variety of roles before joining Campbell's in 1987, moving through several production, operations and warehousing roles before becoming factory general manager two years ago

Domestic:​ Married with two children. Became a grandfather on New Year's Eve

Outside work:​ "I don't know how you are going to phrase this, but I like country pursuits, rural crafts and making walking sticks."