Shop floor dashboards at Faccenda Foods
DASHBOARD DATA FEEDS FACCENDA FOODS GROWTH
As part of its new state of the art 100,000²ft poultry processing facility in Telford, leading UK food processor, Faccenda Foods is pioneering a new production management system, using live shop floor dashboards on each of its 15 processing lines.
“When there is easy access to real-time information, colleagues can make in-line decisions which deliver a positive performance difference to the operation.”
David McCarthy, Production Systems Manager, Faccenda Foods.
As a business, Faccenda is tasked with supplying a wide and varied product range to retail and food service sector customers across the UK, often with same day delivery. As part of its investment at its new site, Faccenda introduced a new software system from SI (Systems Integration), that would provide real-time data to improve and inform its operations.
“From the moment we displayed information such as target weights for fixed weight products, scheduled processing times and giveaways against our defined targets on dashboards, our teams have been much more engaged”.
David McCarthy, Production Systems Manager, Faccenda Foods.
With dashboards incorporated on each of its processing lines, the business has already realised the benefits and positive impact of sharing data in an easy to understand format, as David McCarthy, Faccenda’s Production Systems Manager explains: “When there is easy access to real-time information, colleagues can make in-line decisions which deliver a positive performance difference to the operation.
“From the moment we displayed information such as target weights for fixed weight products, scheduled processing times and giveaways against our defined targets on dashboards, our teams have been much more engaged.
Each line is now aware of how well they are doing and any anomalies that are occurring. Friendly competition has emerged as one line aims to perform better than the other. As a by-product, staff share more knowledge and information and are more likely to proactively suggest changes to improve performance.
We now use the real-time information on yield, giveaway and productivity to drive the agenda and actions in our Short Interval Control, (SIC), shop floor meetings.
This has had a positive impact on team work and helped us to achieve a much greater visibility of our performance through the processes undertaken to deliver a finished customer ready product. We now use the real time information on yield, giveaway and productivity to drive the agenda and actions in our Short Interval Control, (SIC), shop floor meetings.”
David McCarthy, Production Systems Manager, Faccenda Foods.
100% consistency in label design and integrity – delivered
“SI also manages our range of Weigh Price labellers and Outer Case labelling systems. We do this centrally through our planning and scheduling team. By doing so we have delivered 100% consistency in label design and integrity across all 15 production lines. Date and batch coding are governed by the system negating the necessity of operator input and reducing our risk to human error. Over and underproduction of individual SKUs is therefore managed, reducing processing waste. As a result, our operation is more efficient but also provides our customers with greater reliability, which is recognised as a key strength in our relationship with them.
We are now looking at how we can use SI in our “Ready to Cook” operation. As well as the standard systems we have at Telford managing operating parameters, batch and date coding through scheduling, we are developing a stock management system for pre-batching ingredients for production assembly runs.”
Paperless QA
“This, in turn, will give us 100% traceability through electronic data archiving, without the requirement for paperwork. We will also use the system to drive ingredient and packaging ordering direct with suppliers ensuring stock is maintained at optimum levels. In “Ready to Cook” we will continue the rollout with our paperless QA solution, which we have implemented at Telford, where all checks are performed on connected devices and information is archived automatically.”
As Rob Stephens, Managing Director of SI explained: “To date we have integrated the labelling, quality assurance, weighing and various WMS systems used to transfer stock records for Faccenda Foods. Moving forward, we are now looking at how we can help the Faccenda team integrate other areas of the business, including its stock tracking system.
“The main advantage of Faccenda Foods taking a modular approach to implementing our solutions, is that we have been able to train staff and embed each new module in a systematic way, ensuring it works, before moving onto the next phase.
“This has had clear benefits and delivered a great deal of confidence to staff that have never used such systems before and with the dashboard, there have been some unexpected, but very welcome additional benefits.”