Around the block
Dave Turvey, operations director, Kerrygold, Leek
I didn't do fantastically well in my school exams, but I was pretty good at football. So when I left was pinning my hopes on becoming a professional footballer. I got pretty close I had trials with Southampton, which was in the first division at the time, but I didn't make it. In the end, I went to work in a local soft drinks factory, which was a bit embarrassing, because I thought all my friends were doing amazing jobs. But once I'd started, there was no looking back, and by the time I was 23, I was a production manager.
I moved around the soft drinks industry until the late 1990s, but realised I could end up becoming pigeonholed if I didn't make a move into a different sector pretty soon.
So in the summer of 1999, I arrived here at Kerrygold's cheese packing site as manufacturing manager. Back then, the site was where our car park is now and we were handling about 35,000t of cheese compared with 60,000t now. It was also mostly pre-packed product we were cutting large blocks into smaller blocks whereas today we do slicing, grating and deli-packs as well.
When I arrived, I felt the site needed a massive culture change, and I brought in a couple of people I knew would help me make that happen. Several people had been here for years and although they had lots of valuable experience, some were also reluctant to change. We also had an absenteeism rate of 8.5%, which wasn't great. One of the first things I did was put all first-line managers through management training, which made a huge difference to the way we operate.
We've increased productivity by 20% over the last 10 years, and a lot of the progress has come through working together more.
We are all part of the same team with the same objectives. If something goes wrong, everyone needs to address it. Likewise, if something goes well, we all share that success.
There has also been a shift away from quality control and auditing to quality assurance. It's all part of people taking responsibility and ownership. Absenteeism is now at around 3.5%. I know everyone says this, but people really are your best assets. It doesn't matter if you've got brand new facilities or whatever, you are always going to struggle if you don't have the right people.
We have a culture of continuous improvement (CI) here, but you don't have to spend a fortune to make progress I prefer to set up small projects championed by first-line managers. You go to some factories where they have made big gains from CI, but then discover they have a whole team dedicated to it. Some of them are spending £200,000 just on these people's wages, which means they have got to work pretty hard to justify their existence.
Another thing that has also helped drive productivity lately is our Mainsaver computerised maintenance management system, which has helped us to develop a more strategic approach to preventative maintenance (PM). It generates work orders, but it has also helped us see what is causing the most persistent problems and identifying the ideal frequency for PM tasks. This has really helped boost reliability.
In January 2006, I became operations director, at which point I became responsible for engineering, technical, warehousing and services as well as production. It was at this point that the senior management all sat down and thought about whether what we had was fit for purpose. And the answer was no.
The site we were on before wasn't really designed to handle what we were doing it was a bit like a rabbit warren there was not really a very logical flow. We were cramming packing lines into space that didn't exist; we had effectively doubled outputs in 10 years and were stretched to the limit. We explored a number of options from expanding what we had to building on a greenfield or brownfield site either way, we wanted to build the most efficient and environmentally friendly cheese-packing plant in Europe.
In the end we decided to build a brand new facility next door. While moving might sound appealing, as soon as you consider the potential disruption to your workforce, it becomes less so. You hear of so many firms where they move to a new site, lose half their staff and get into serious trouble.
If you ask me today what work issues keep me awake at night, I'd say I sleep very soundly and I really mean that. But if you had asked me the same question about 18 months ago when I was in the middle of managing the changeover to the new site, you would have got a very different answer!
Professionally, this was the biggest challenge I'd ever faced because I was juggling so many things at once. I was really out of my comfort zone. In the run up, the md Carl Ravenhall, my engineering manager and I were having meetings every two weeks for what seemed like years, and every time we met we would change something. The first steel was put in the ground in September 2007 and we then had to move all the lines over to the new site over a 12-week period in the autumn of 2008 without impacting on customer service levels. While you can build up some stock to cover this kind of disruption, it doesn't completely solve your problems because the supermarkets still want a certain shelf-life on their cheese.
Cutting edge environment
The new site has high care and low care facilities, which is different to our old one. It wasn't a necessity for what we're doing but firms such as Tesco our biggest customer are definitely pushing things in this direction.
From an environmental point of view, this site really is state of the art. We've got everything from inverters on pumps and fans to passive infra-red lighting controls and photovoltaic cells (to generate electricity from sunlight) on the roof I call it the world's most expensive bike shed! We also have a combined heat and power plant.
Operationally, what we do here is pretty straightforward: cheese arrives in 20kg blocks and we cut, slice or grate it and pack it mostly for the major supermarkets' own-labels. Retail volumes are pretty stable so the focus is on getting the mix right some formats are more profitable than others and being as efficient as possible through maximising yields. In terms of driving sales volumes, there are probably more opportunities in foodservice, so we are exploring these right now.
As for how cheese packing has evolved, one of the big changes has been switching from wires to guillotines for cutting strips of cheese into individual pieces. You get more accuracy and yield although you will never get 100%. With some types of cheese and formats, you are lucky to get 90%. However, we can use some off-cuts for grating. We are also working with suppliers to ensure that the blocks coming in are more uniform in size and weight.
Price-wise, there has been huge volatility in the last couple of years, which makes life very interesting and tough. Prices went off the scale in 2007, back down in late 2008 and stayed reasonably stable for six months or so, but then started to go up again.
I have a great team of people here, so boring though it sounds, I'm not lying awake at night panicking about what might go wrong. I don't get the calls at 2am on a Sunday that I used to get in soft drinks. The bigger challenge is trying to sustain improvements and not letting things slip. It's a constant juggling act.
Do I ever wonder what my life might have been like if I had made it as a footballer? Not really. I like what I do now and I still get to watch the football on TV!
Interview by Elaine Watson
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FACTORY FACTS
Location: Kerrygold, Barnfields Industrial Estate, Sunnyhills Road, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 5SP
Tel: 01538 399111
Staff: 550
Operating hours: 6am-10pm Mon to Fri, with some night/weekend work in busy periods
Products: Kerrygold supplies about a third of UK own-label supermarket cheese - plus several caterers. It has 400 stock keeping units. The cheese is supplied as pre-packed blocks, grated, sliced or in deli packs via 20 packing lines
Output: 60,000t cheese a year, with capacity to handle 85,000t
Packaging: Pre-packed cheese is flushed with carbon dioxide; grated is flushed with nitrogen and zip-resealable packs are flushed with a combination of both.
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PERSONAL
Name: Dave Turvey
Age: 51
Career highlights: “Being offered the ops director role here and then successfully transferring operations from our old site our new site.”
Domestics: Married with two daughters, 24 and 28
Outside work: Playing and watching especially football, golf and racing
