Family owned Frederick’s Dairies is the largest UK owned ice-cream manufacturer and recent winner of ‘The Grocer’ Gold Award for private label frozen foods.  Frederick’s, a major player in hand held ices as exclusive licensees of Cadbury and Del-Monte brands in ice-cream, have recently invested £10m in a new tub production facility – Europe’s largest ice cream production line - to open up this additional area in the market. They have an outstanding reputation in developing new products and markets as demonstrated with their new Del-Monte Smoothie range and as recent winners of 2 British Frozen Food Federation awards for new products.

 A plant-wide, board led initiative at the Skelmersdale site had opened up new capacity and reduced waste on existing lines. However, whilst it was recognised that further efficiencies were technically possible, it was not apparent how to achieve them. 

As a result the Management Team reviewed the consultancy market and selected Newton. Frank Frederick, the Company CEO commented.  “We liked the team and their track record. I also liked the guarantee that if they didn’t deliver value I would not have to pay.”

Newton’s brief was to work with the shop floor teams creating a sustainable system of performance improvement.  This would be achieved by a combination of complex problem solving, and engineering and technical solutions involving no capital expenditure.

The initial focus was on one problem line, and then working on three other lines within the facility. David Taylor, Deputy Managing Director at Frederick’s outlined the reason for the timing of the project, “Having made significant investment in new plant to better support our customers, we needed to maximise the efficiency of output and further improve quality.”

The solution to the challenge of increasing efficiencies and reducing waste consisted of dozens of engineering, technical and organisational actions and changes, rather than a single solution explains John D'Arcy, Consultant with Newton. ‘Firstly, we implemented a system whereby problems were quantified and then prioritised by cash value to the business, thus ensuring that our limited resources were always directed towards our most important problems.’

 
The two person Newton team was embedded within shop floor teams, working alongside operators and engineers. Adam Cleevely, Consultant with Newton, was impressed with the proactive attitude displayed by the team at Frederick’s ‘Frequently, problems briefly discussed in the workshop in the evening would have been completed by the next morning. The project resulted in solving numerous problems previously considered to be ‘the nature of the beast’, and therefore unsolvable’. We were able to complement the engineering skills on site, develop problem solving skills within engineering and production and ensure that the limited resource available was always working on the business critical problems, not just fire-fighting.’ A major challenge facing the team was increasing output on a choc-ice line. ‘The choc-ice line presented many problems’ explains Adam Cleevely ‘The line relied on high availability of 5 coupled machines, all of which were under-performing’.   A particular problem was the case packing machine, which would stop for a myriad of reasons, up to 20 times an hour, and was frequently the largest contributor to rework that was having a significant impact on the efficiency of the overall machine. Developing accumulation before the case packer decoupled this part of the line and alone increased efficiencies by 9%. Installing the accumulation made clearer the issues with upstream machines and by methodically studying these, upwards of 50 permanent changes were made to improve performance.   An example of the benefit of these studies concerned the wrapper machine. The wrapper was the largest individual contributor to waste and again beset by numerous small problems. 1 hour studies were carried out at the wrapper in-feed and out-feed to identify the largest causes to waste and downtime One by one, guides were redesigned, timings were perfected and the uniformity of product to the wrapper was improved. 15 improvements reduced the cost of waste and downtime due to the wrapper by 73%. 

‘Frederick’s had technical issues common across the FMCG sector’ continues D’Arcy. ‘All lines suffered from numerous short duration high frequency downtime and waste problems. On one line, over 15% of waste was eliminated by monitoring the pattern of failure on 504 repeating moulds. Once we had found the faulty moulds, the problem was easily identified, and rectified over a weekend. The whole team was extremely satisfied to see the improvement in the figures continue week by week.’

The project has delivered a significant impact on the bottom line of the business with labour efficiency on two of the lines up by 61% and 79% and waste on both more than halved. The charts below show the efficiency improvement on one line and the waste reduction on another                                                                                                               

In addition to the fast step change in performance, a sustainable system has been set up to ensure that Frederick’s continues to benefit in the long term. The key members of the team from shop floor to Operations Director are maintaining the systematic approach brought by Newton to continue efficiency improvement

Improving the lines further will help Frederick’s to improve market share says David Taylor, ‘Sustaining this improvement in the long term increases our capacity, enabling further sales and reduces our costs associated with waste.’

 Indeed, the improvement achieved on one of the lines has allowed new product development to be expedited as production time has become available on the machine.  

Frank Frederick, Managing Director at Frederick’s summed up Newton’s contribution to the overall success of the project ‘Newton’s involvement meant that many things that had previously been known as factual limitations on operational efficiency were removed.’