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Keeping Food Production Profitable: How Bay Valley Foods has Impacted Profit in 10 Plants in Under a Year

On-Demand Webcast - 1hr 00 min

Discussion Points

• Food and Beverage Producers are Getting a Reality Check.

The rapidly escalating prices of raw materials, utilities, transportation are digging directly into profits. Meanwhile, continued economic woes, such as the Credit Crunch, are driving down consumer spending and prices. These changes in the business climate are not cyclical—they are systemic, and require a permanent and sustained response from industry to get profitable again and stay profitable.

What does this response look like? While external pressures increase, the best—perhaps the only response—is internal. Food producers must find new efficiencies inside their plants, by fostering daily best practices, and measuring and monitoring their operations even more rigorously. This response must be sponsored and led from the board room, not from the operational level.

• It’s Time to Get “Real” about Performance

CDC Factory has conducted its Benchmark and Audit at over 150 food and beverage factories in North America and Europe. The Benchmark and Audit is a 3-day process consisting of line-side observation and on-site interviews. During the process, CDC Factory has recorded data on the major losses of efficiency and yield that plants experience, the further losses resulting from business behaviors, and the improvement opportunities categorized by people, plant, and process.

From the collected data, surprising trends have come to light that indicate previously undiscovered opportunities for food producers to reclaim these lost efficiencies. The most surprising of these is the perceived “maximum” efficiency that factories believe they can achieve. The key to breaking through this false limit is to empower the workforce in innovative ways. The result is unleashed performance and profit.

• A Case in Point: Bay Valley Foods: George Jurkovich, SVP Operations

Bay Valley Foods, a subsidiary of TreeHouse Foods (NYSE:THS), operates 17 plants making a wide array of products for the private label and foodservice markets. Bay Valley is an excellent case of a company that has responded to external economic pressures by making positive internal changes. CDC Factory’s manufacturing operations management (MOM) innovation has been deployed across 10 plants in a matter of months, and is already yielding results in less than one year.

By deploying CDC Factory, Bay Valley has engaged the entire workforce of the 10 plants in a consistently executed Continuous Improvement initiative that empowers every factory worker to take action towards greater efficiency, productivity, and profit. CDC Factory collects information in real time, which gives managers and executives a uniform, meaningful view of their operations across the plant network. Best practices have been institutionalized throughout the company. Moreover, across the 10 plants, Bay Valley is on track to save a total of $2.5M in the first year of using the system.

Bay Valley Foods’s efforts represent breakthrough performance: a systemic, executive led, reality-based initiative that empowers the workforce. The result is not only higher profitability now, but a more competitive and performance-driven culture to sustain that profitability for the future.

Moderator

David R. Brousell Editor-in-Chief, Managing Automation David R. Brousell has been Editor-in-Chief of Managing Automation since 1998. Brousell started his career in technology journalism in 1978 at Electronic News. In 1985, he joined Datamation Magazine, and was named Editor-in-Chief in 1991. Brousell has covered numerous industry developments, technology shifts and major product introductions, including the mainframe era and the development of relational databases; the rise of the minicomputer; the advent of personal computing, client-server computing and the evolution of enterprise applications, and the dawn of the Internet and the worldwide web. Along the way, he has interviewed such notables as ENIAC inventor J. Presper Eckert, IBM's Thomas J. Watson Jr., Microsoft's Bill Gates, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Cincom's Tom Nies, Lotus's Mitchell Kapor, Netscape's James Barksdale, and Intel's Andrew Grove. Brousell has received numerous journalism awards, including two consecutive Jesse H. Neal Editorial Achievement Awards, the highest award for business journalism in the U.S. Under his leadership at MA, the magazine has been cited 9 times for editorial achievement.

Panelists

George Jurkovich Senior Vice President of Operations, Bay Valley Foods George Jurkovich is a food industry expert with a career spanning over 20 years, including 12 years at H.J. Heinz Company, where he directed the manufacturing, engineering, procurement, distribution and customer service for a $5.0 billion division, and managed 34 factories. In his current role at Bay Valley Foods, he is responsible for 17 plants throughout North America. Mark Sutcliffe President of CDC Factory, CDC Software Mark Sutcliffe is an authority and speaker on people-focused change management. Sutcliffe founded MVI Technology, which was acquired by CDC Software in 2006 and re-launched in 2007 as CDC Factory. Today, Sutcliffe continues to drive strategy and productivity for food production and consumer products companies based on work conducted with experts from companies as diverse as Gillette, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and The Coca-Cola Company.