Company

Our client is a company that specializes in chilled ready meals and components.

Situation

The company did have a good control over their labour costs, material losses however were well above budget and became only visible at the end of each month after the stock count.

Gwynt was asked by the CFO to help the company to get “in control” over and to realize a structural reduction in their material losses. In short reducing material losses at a food producer

Approach

We started by comparing the master data with reality and mapping the product flow. Next we measured the material flows during a week and prepared a mass balance: from the raw materials at inbound to finished product at the outbound area, and all losses that occurred on the shop floor. As a result we got insight into the main losses and could carry out a number of focussed improvements. At the same time we made employees aware of material losses: we learned them to see the losses, to register them and gave them the motivation to reduce them. We started to daily monitor 2 KPI’s (Realization vs plan and Overweight Meals) to enable the company to sustain the improvements.

Results

The matter; Reducing material losses at a food producer. The material losses have been reduced by 30% and are better controlled due to the daily follow-up instead of the monthly stock count.

The learnings from the mass balance are applied during the New Product Development process.

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