We recently spoke to our client Lucy Wills, Chief Operating Officer for Finsbury Food Group, about the drivers for investing in an operational excellence program and why Finsbury chose to partner with CCi on its continuous improvement journey.
What were your drivers for investing in an operational excellence program?
We decided to invest heavily in an operational excellence program because over the past 15 years Finsbury has been what you’d describe as an acquisition vehicle. We purchased lots of fantastic individual businesses and integrated them into our group. That brings with it some challenges around cultural diversity, different approaches and ways of working, and various levels of maturity.
We’ve invested heavily in a systems platform across the business that has allowed us to have a common language between all of the Finsbury businesses. But next, what we really wanted to be able to do is to leverage the benefits of being a group. That is about having a consistent way of operating and having a standard that you are driving towards in order to make yourself, I use the strap line quite a lot in the business, “better tomorrow than you are today.” And that’s a continuous improvement journey. So, for us, the only way to do that effectively is actually to drive it through the lens of operating excellence.
Why did you invest in this program versus other solutions?
The reason that we partnered with CCi to invest in the 2nd phase of our Operating Brilliance Program, was because we wanted to have a maturity-led approach to our Excellence program. It’s easy to drive quick improvements that are not sustained. I can attest to having done that many times in my career. But actually, what we want to do is have sustained benefit over many years to come. That’s important to our business model. What we see more and more is, in order to compete, you must have a competitive supply chain. You can only do that if you have a mature supply chain and you’re only going to drive that if you’re building operating excellence maturity.
What we really liked about the CCi approach is two-fold. Firstly, CCi really focus you on the people aspects of operating excellence. And I would describe that as the secret sauce that makes everything work. Unless you have that part really firing, then you won’t drive maturity because you’re not engaging people’s hearts and minds. But the other thing that really appealed to us was the CCi TRACC platform itself. Ultimately, one day we want to be self-sustainable in this journey. And we can’t do that by marking our own homework. We need to have a set of standards that we’re operating to, that we’re continually progressing towards world class and the CCi TRACC platform allows you to actually achieve that.
We also see the Operating Brilliance program as a mechanism for attracting and retaining talent within the business as it offers great learning and development opportunities which genuinely all individuals irrespective of level or business area can get involved in.
What’s it been like working with CCi?
Working with CCi has been a really refreshing experience. Everyone that has contributed so far to making our program a success, has become a partner to our business. There’s no differentiation between Finsbury people and CCi people involved in the program. CCi have brought knowledge, expertise and a high degree of capability to our excellence approach. But what they’ve also brought is an almost natural ability to connect with everybody across the Finsbury team, from people at my level right down to our team members who are based in our plants. That’s something that gives CCi an edge in terms of other partners I’ve worked with previously in this space.
What results have been achieved so far?
Finsbury was able to accelerate the deployment of its operational excellence program much faster than it originally planned, by rolling out to 30% more of its portfolio than initially forecasted in the first year. It was also able to begin coaching people and teams to identify and drive performance improvements ahead of schedule.
This was largely the result of the Loss and Waste exercise followed by a Rapid Deployment, which enabled Finsbury to quickly start adopting those efficiencies identified and realizing the benefits. The same methodology was also applied to existing initiatives already within the business which had a significant ‘halo’ performance impact on those initiatives. Finsbury is now using that governance approach across its entire organization to realize further benefits.This has helped Finsbury achieve significant fiscal benefits, around 25% more than what they targeted to achieve in the first year of the program.
Stay tuned
We’re continuing our work with Finsbury Food Group including an organization wide rollout of CCi TRACC and will be sharing further insights, as well as the impressive results they’re achieving as the program continues to progress.
Contributor
Lucy Wills is Chief Operating Officer at Finsbury Food Group. Lucy has over 19 years’ experience in the food manufacturing sector working across business, operations and operational excellence roles. Lucy joined Finsbury in 2011 and has progressed through various, site and business wide leadership roles before moving into the COO role. Under her remit she has led the operational excellence program at Finsbury Food Group since its inception, focusing on driving operational excellence across their supply chain.