Greencore empowers workers

Greencore is pumping over £400,000 into a project designed to deliver a step-change in factory efficiency by shifting responsibility for performance management from senior executives down to the shopfloor.

The new overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) programme to standardise factory data capture, performance management and plant business intelligence has begun at the company's cakes and desserts bakery in Hull, said the site's operations director David Gallagher.

"We're already pretty good at capturing data from our equipment, but often staff have to take read-outs and then manually key in data into our system and this is then analysed retrospectively by managers," said Gallagher.

Mvi Technology's real-time performance management system Eventsengine will be used to capture data automatically and display it on screens to shopfloor staff in real-time so that they can act on it immediately.

"It's about empowering team leaders to take decisions there and then," said Gallagher.

Hull was currently in the installation phase, he said. "We're about to go live on a third of the bakery." Assuming the Hull installation is a success, Eventsengine would gradually be rolled out across the rest of the company, he added. "The only way to keep pace with escalating costs is to offset them through continuous improvement that drives production efficiency. Our enterprise resource planning system provides excellent financial visibility. Eventsengine will do the same for production operations."

Greencore had reduced its operational costs significantly through a "relentless focus on total lowest cost", said the company.

"This is as much about culture and leadership as it is about process and efficiency," it said. "We continue to deliver operational cost improvements in excess of 2% of sales."

Operating profit on its continuing operations rose by 2.2% year-on-year in the six months to the end of March to euro 30.3M, on sales 8.1% higher at euro 441.7M.

Convenience foods accounted for 72% of operating profit in the six months compared with 25% in 2000 and would rise further as a result of its planned halt to sugar processing, the company said.

It said that the number of its suppliers was now down to 4,300 from 6,000 18 months ago with more likely to be cut.