BIGGER PICTURE CASE STUDIES
This £90m customer dedicated food company had been heavily loss making for around 6 years before being acquired by a major VC backed UK business. Working with the management team the business achieved break even within 12 weeks and within 1 year achieved industry leading EBITDA. With the existing management team we led this phenomenal transformation by working smartly with the customer to achieve better material usage, reduce waste and re-engineer product ranging and formulations. We then re-structured the business to significantly reduce cost and implemented a major lean manufacturing efficiency program.
Manufacturing Footprint consolidation
A major UK food business required to consolidate their manufacturing sites from 5 to 4. This involved the closure of 1 site and the transfer of a £40m business into a sister facility. We successfully completed the transfer of business while maintaining continuity of supply to the customer. We then implemented a hugely successful manufacturing efficiency program to drive transformational results from the increased scale business.
Manufacturing Outsourcing
A business unable to be price competitive required a change of strategy to drive market share and improve financial performance. We reviewed the manufacturing strategy and outsourced some parts of the manufacturing process overseas. This delivered significantly improved product cost and enabled simplification of the UK facility which in turn enabled us to restructure the business and reduce cost. We then took the company’s excellent innovation and outsourced the manufacture of some highly exciting products to the far east delivering highly competitive a new and exciting retail offering to drive £6m of new sales in the first year.
Strategic market entry & start up
Following a major European acquisition, a vertically integrated global aqua-culture business required a strategy to enter the UK market. We secured a major retail contract, and for all sorts of reasons we were required to deliver the biggest and fastest factory launch ever seen in UK food manufacturing. Starting a mammoth £100m operation from scratch in a matter of weeks during the main seasonal peak is no easy task and wasn’t without pain – but we got it done. Building the management capability, a custom built facility and then hiring and training a workforce of over 500 people in less than 10 weeks took some effort and teamwork!
Business Recovery
For this business things had gone badly wrong and they were delivering unacceptable service and product quality to their main customer. Urgent action was required to turn around quality and restore confidence with the customer in the run up to the most important supply period of the year. Working with the team, we implemented an urgent rebuild of quality systems and restored quality. We quickly implemented a major manufacturing efficiency program restoring efficiency and service levels. The company was recognised by their biggest customer and received an award for service level over the peak period.
Early stage operational challenges
This organisation had invested heavily opening a new state of the art facility, but had severe challenges in achieving product quality and consistency. The plant was seriously sub-scale and was struggling to achieve manufacturing out-put and efficiency. We quickly developed the product quality & consistency and developed a “simplicity and scale” program. By simplifying product range and carefully rebuilding raw material scheduling and manufacturing we achieved stability which then provided a platform for building scale. Over 6 months we secured significant new contracts and achieved stabilised the new plant.