Food and Beverage

More Capacity, Lower Costs. What More Could You Want?

More capacity and lower costs is the never-ending goal. Getting there requires an organization that embraces change. It requires a culture that can sustain gains and leverage improvements for market growth and profitability.

The time for dabbling is over. You need results. It’s time to reignite your continuous improvement program and take it to the next level. TBM can help accelerate the returns from your process improvement efforts, release pent-up capacity and dramatically lower per case costs. From frozen foods, dairy, ingredients, beverages and food packaging, we’ve worked with food and food-related manufacturers around the world to make rapid progress at stand-alone and multiple-site facilities.

Some of the challenges that we’ve helped our clients solve, include:

  • Removing capacity constraints caused by excessively long changeover times and cleaning cycles
  • Eliminating unplanned downtime
  • Improving raw material yield and reducing costly giveaways
  • Minimizing consumer complaints and product rejects
  • Lowering above average injury or illness rates
  • Reducing or eliminating wasteful energy costs
  • Engaging and empowering employees to ensure ownership and reduce high turnover

With so many opportunities for improvement, it can be difficult to know where to start. TBM can help you set business priorities and fully leverage Lean and Six Sigma techniques, which we combine as Lean Sigma. We start by helping you build your continuous improvement team’s knowledge and skills, including training, exposure to best practice operations, and hands-on coaching. Using a combination of project teams and the kaizen breakthrough methodology, we help clients move their operations forward simultaneously in multiple areas. Kaizen teams drastically reduce changeover times, eliminate unexpected equipment breakdowns, utilize standard operating procedures, create visual factories, enhance labor flexibility and foster employee engagement.

It sounds so simple. But as any business leader who has tried to understand and implement such a program without adequate support will attest, it’s all too easy to become distracted by daily output demands and fall back into old habits. The hardest part is always cultural, which provides the foundation for sustainable progress. But if it were easy, everyone would do it and there would be no competitive advantage.

Food and beverage companies that have embraced a Lean Sigma approach to regularly achieve double-digit productivity and quality improvements. They are able to leverage operating cost advantages over their competitors and invest those savings in other areas of the business. Some of the characteristics that distinguish Lean Sigma food and beverage operations include:

  • Visual performance displays at both the end of the production line and at each stage of the process
  • Order of magnitude improvements in cleanliness
  • Best-in-class equipment reliability and capacity utilization without stops and starts or slowdowns
  • Supervisors situated on the production floor
  • Engaged employees that actively participate in problem-solving exercises
  • Optimal process yield with no wasted ingredients and no giveaways

As a senior executive at a TBM food industry client said, "We need every brain in the organization asking how to do it better, faster and safer. Lean has gotten everyone involved and improved connectivity between plants because everyone now speaks a common language."

TBM business consultants have worked with food and beverage industry clients around the world to generate breakthrough results. To learn more about our experience and how we can help your company move forward, contact us at 91.124.437.5995.