Last year Charlie Bigham’s witnessed impressive profit growth, with pre-tax profits reaching £7.6 million – a 37% increase.
But the road to success was not without its bumps. Beneath the calm veneer, the premium ready-meals firm had been working frantically behind the scenes to keep up.
Ending the fire-fighting
In this interview, head of IT, Mike Calverley, Food Manufacture reveals the pains its legacy systems had been causing teams, with the business experiencing outages as a result of technology that just couldn’t cope.
“We had all these legacy systems failing and we were having major incidents,” Calverley said.
“We were firefighting and trying to fix all these bolt-ons; and it was taking my whole team all our time to keep everything going.”
Outages: they were just a real scourge for us.
Head of IT, Mike Calverley, Charlie Bigham's
Faced with ageing tech, the team was spending most of their time dousing the flames rather than focusing on value-added tasks that could support innovation and growth. At the same time, wider industry challenges such as poor harvests and supply chain costs were also heaping pressure onto a brand model depending on premium quality.
“We had to adapt,” Calverley said. “We hadn’t invested enough in our IT infrastructure and probably didn’t invest enough in the people to maintain those systems.”
Calverley was brought into the business around four years ago, when the IT team was made up of one other person. During this time, Bigham’s underwent a major overhaul which involved getting its entire set-up integrated.
“We knew that by integrating them, we would streamline our business processes,” Calverley added.
The transformation
‘Project Inter8’ wasn’t simply a software swap but a redesign of how systems connected and worked together.
The transformation took time, but has given Bigham’s full traceability over its materials. The moment an ingredient arrives on site it is receipted into the ‘Syspro’ system. A label with a barcode is automatically created, allowing the team to trace the item throughout its entire journey – during picking, production, packaging and even which store it goes to.
But it’s also helped to create a really efficient process for the team.
“Orders come straight into Syspro. We’re then able to manufacture them; and then when we post them, it sends the invoice automatically out – so we get paid daily,” Calverley explained.
He continued: “There were eight integrations in total. [And] by having those integrations seamlessly working with a middleware platform – called Codeless – just meant that we weren’t updating point solutions, which were massively time consuming. It was more productive for everybody.”
The system has also been great for forecast planning – a particularly helpful asset for a business receiving orders every day, according to Calverley. This has been key in helping to reduce wastage – with Bigham’s recently managing to hit a major ambition and eliminate all edible waste across its operation.
Strengthening cybersecurity
In addition, the investment introduced a new level of security to the manufacturer. One of the goals had been to achieve Cyber Essentials (CE) Plus – an advanced government-backed certification for cybersecurity.
“It’s all to do with making sure your network’s secure – that if an attacker got in, they can’t then just move laterally across your network and encrypt everything,” Calverley explained.
To obtain a certificate, a business must go through an audit – a process which Calverley describes as “intense”.
Bigham’s has since achieved this badge of honour, upgrading its systems and moving from an on-premise model (data servers kept on site) to a cloud model.
The cloud-based system also means Bigham’s won’t repeat the same mistakes – with its tech now able to automatically update and remain current.
“We’ve got a very good process in place now in terms of ensuring that the latest technology – e.g. upgrades and fixes to the existing software – is deployed as quickly as we can, but in a very safe manner.”
This CE Plus certification is likely to be something more manufacturers will have to explore, with big retailers such as Tesco, stipulating it as a requirement.
“To be able to work with Tesco, for example, you have to have that badge because it shows that we’re taking cybersecurity very seriously.”
With cybercriminals targeting food and drink manufacturers with much more force, this new perspective has come at the right time.
New research from global procurement and supply chain consultancy, Proxima found that 52% of UK CEOs say they’ve experienced a supply chain disruption caused by a cyber incident over the last 24 months. Moreover, 45% agreed that significant revenue would be at risk if a key supplier fell victim to a cyberattack.
Yet less than half have conducted a full cyber resilience stress test across critical suppliers during the past 12 months.
We’ve seen the catastrophic consequences these kinds of attacks can impose on a business – and this is a burden Calverley knows only too well and one he’s not eager to relive.
“I used to work for a company and we didn’t have that [CE Plus],” he shared. “We did suffer a cyberattack and it was the worst time of my life.”
Alongside its new certification, Calverley said the business has invested in its people. From its one-man-IT-band, Bigham’s now has a full-time cyber security specialist on contract and an 11-strong IT team.
Its efforts into digital security have also meant the ready-meal producer has secured cyber insurance.
“This is important because if the worst happened, we know that we’ve got cyber insurance in place that would cover our profit loss over the time,” he pointed out.
Reflecting on the journey, he added: “Doing this Syspro 8 upgrade […] and moving it to the cloud where it’s more reliable, more resilient, more secure – my team is no longer putting out fires. We’re able to do value added project work, which is taking the business forward.”