Company

The client is Europe’s largest intermodal logistics service provider of liquid food in bulk, with a production location for processing juices.

Situation

At this production location, productivity was too low and claims / quality complaints (NCs) too high, resulting in too high costs and a reduced customer satisfaction. We were invited by the CEO to do a quick scan of the operation, and concluded there was no fundament and no routines to deliver a reliable performance. Operational Excellence implementation at a juice processing company

Approach

We have taken over the operational responsibility of the production location on an interim basis and started the implementation of our Culture of Excellence, in order to build a foundation for a stable performance from where we would be able to increase productivity and quality. We focused on 3 of our Culture of Excellence principles:

1. Skilled and motivated people: we have made production management aware of the shortcomings, drawn up work instructions, trained operators and adapted the organization.
2. Tight teamwork: we have introduced a consultation structure and completed current CAPEX projects.
3. Standards as a foundation for improvement: we have made the production orders correct and complete, and updated the cleaning lists and quality checklists.

Results

Operational Excellence implementation at a juice processing company. Direct labour costs have been reduced due to an increase in Productivity of 24%. In addition, indirect labour costs have been reduced due to the removal of 1 management layer.

The claims related to quality issues have been halved.

By establishing standards and norms (for production orders, planning, quality, work instructions) the company has a stable foundation on which it can continue to further improve its performance.

If you are curious about Gwynt’s approach to other customer questions, click here for an overview of our business cases.