Transcript

ROBIN HOWLETT

The sector I work in here is what’s known as fast-moving consumer goods, FMCG, particularly beverages, soft drinks. In FMCG, we have customers and we have consumers. So the consumer is the individual who’s enjoying the drink, and the customer is the retailer.

So you might have grocery, you might have at home, you might have on-the-go. So we have customers in all of those. The biggest area is the grocery, which here are big supermarket chains. They are very demanding.

And in today’s environment, quite often we are set up to take an order and fulfil that order within 24 hours. And that can be on approaching 80% of our output. So that’s what we’re geared up for, and we’re very successful at it.

The volume will change seasonally throughout the year. Christmas is a big spike. Summer is a longer burn, but, yeah, it’s a big uplift. Our quieter times tend to be January after Christmas, January through to March. And that’s when we plan in quite a lot of our more intrusive maintenance on our lines to combine that, so the machines are always there available to run when they need to run.

Given the volumes that we deal with and the speed of response, a lot of it is organised well in advance, although our stock levels are very small. So we will have almost daily deliveries, sometimes during the day. It’s not stockless production, but we don’t have a huge raw material stock.

It’s planned through, I suppose you would call it, an enterprise resource planning, not wanting to mention which particular one. So you have bills, material, set-up. And then, when the planning is-- the planners will schedule things to happen during the day. We might plan a week in advance, but then on the actual day itself, restructure that plan.

It’s all done via computers. It’s done via ERP systems. There’s telemetry systems as well with some ingredient suppliers, so they know exactly how much we might have in a silo or a tank, for instance. Yes, it has to be specially coordinated.

Recently, we’ve had some environmental considerations to deal with. Just yesterday, we had a storm go through the UK, which caused some congestion on motorways. Local things like that do require a lot of intensive effort to ensure we don’t either starve of materials or cause a blockage because we can’t deliver.

There are lots of materials involved in the drinks. There are materials that go into the drain itself. There are materials that go into the packaging to ensure the integrity of the drink until they can get to the consumer. And there are other materials used actually in that transport process.

So if we took a few, so you’d have fruit juices, you’d have CO2 to give the fizz if it’s a carbonated drink. Obviously, there’s water. There may be some additional flavours. There are, on some drinks, some stabiliser and preservative systems. On other drinks, it’s entirely aseptic, so the main ingredient there is no bugs in the manufacturing environment.

So primary ingredients, that’s the liquids and the syrups. The primary packaging will be your preforms for you PT bottles, the caps, the labels, adhesives, also cans, and with the can comes the lid. Then the secondary packaging will be the packaging that holds those containers through to the retailer. It makes the case.

So it could be the tray, cardboard tray, a plastic shrink film on top of that. They get collated onto a pallet. The pallet, itself, could have a tertiary or third-level packaging around it, a shrink film, so that it doesn’t collapse when it’s being moved from, say, the warehouse onto the vehicle and during the vehicle’s run to the customer.

The process is extremely automated. On a typical production line, from the beginning of the syrup makeup to the goods being ready to go into the warehouse, you may have typically four or five people for the entire shift on that line. So now, you’re talking very small numbers.

So a typical day for an operations manager would comprise – we have a plan today. Some people call it Leader Standard Work. So the day will start, normally, with a shift handover meeting. So if you was a shift manager, you would be in a shift handover meeting.

Then, about an hour or so after that, you’d have the 24-hour daily meeting. And throughout the day, we have short-interval control meetings. So roughly every two or four hours, there will be a line side meeting as well.

So the day for a manager is fairly well-scripted. The meetings aren’t very long. They’re short and punchy with very clear agendas and clear outputs needed. In between, the managers have the time, then, to do whatever improvement activity needs to be done, or other planned tasks – maybe recruitment, maybe dealing with a supply issue. So the days, themselves, are fairly well-scripted.

The quality when you’re dealing with, especially, food ingredients, there’s a lot of regulation there, as you would expect. And that quality side begins way down the supply chain, so it’s very important when we’re dealing or thinking about a new item to bring in. There’s a lot of work gets done by the quality teams to assure that supply source. If they are established ingredients, then there’s an ongoing surveillance.

The quality side will also pick up to check that the blend is right so that there’ll be a recipe. It certainly involves some automated testing, as well, from the process streams, things like CO2, bricks, which is the sugar levels, can be automatically sensed in real time. But then, products might be taken samples, taste-tested as well.

There is automated fill levels. There’s lots of automation involved to sense that it is actually right every time. We couldn’t operate this sort of process without knowing precisely what’s going on.

Continuous improvement, certainly in our industry – and I guess it goes everywhere – is extremely important for all sorts of reasons. There’s always pressure on cost, so you have to continually improve to hold your margins. There’s changes in the external environment with, maybe, competition work, so you have to strive and work hard to maintain your position. So continuous improvement’s a given there. And of course, extra effort’s required to gain market share and to gain value for your shareholders.

Most of it’s team-based. So I mentioned earlier in the structured meetings a technique called short-interval control. That’s the start point, in a way. So every two hours or more, people are thinking about the previous two hours, they might be thinking about the next two hours, and what can they change and improve even at that level.

Then there are weekly forums across all the shifts for looking back and looking at trends, how things are going. And we always involve the process operators, whether it’s in an office or on the line, in the improvement of their task. They are the very best-placed people to do it.

So we don’t have so much specialists. We have to involve, and use, and utilise all of our people doing it. It’s very much a team-based thing.