Noble Foods is a leading supplier of fresh food brands to major retailers and consumers nationwide. Their four egg packing and distribution sites are strategically positioned across the UK. The Standlake packing centre in Oxfordshire completely redefines the concept of an egg grading facility; it uses the latest technology and most advanced equipment in the world. It’s a mammoth operation – 200 people, over 2 million eggs per day, 7 days a week. Eggs are inspected, x-rayed, graded, and sorted before being packed into retail boxes and shipped out.
However, the cracks were beginning to show. Outdated management styles mixed in with a diverse workforce and continual labour churn left Standlake labelled ‘problematic’. Noble Foods knew it was time to call in reinforcements and they asked Coriolis for an emergency interim General Manager to whisk up some people-powered transformation.
“People make businesses succeed. Yes, they use systems, methods, and processes, but at the end of the day it’s human beings that make or break you.”
We got cracking immediately – side-by-side with the people. Gain their trust, challenge them, recognise them, and support them – that’s our recipe for operational excellence. But, in a competitive labour market recruiting and retaining the right people is even more challenging. So, we came up with an innovative approach by lifting shift restrictions and attracted many workers who needed extra flexibility, particularly during the pandemic.
The result was one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve ever experienced. In less than 2 months there was a 25% increase in output and we’d stabilised the most volatile site in the group. Now, that’s eggs-traordinary! Especially considering that Covid was a constant concern to 200 people – we kept them protected and working throughout whilst making the grade with customer service levels and high demand.
What’s more, our man on the ground identified an engineering issue beyond the original project scope. Despite heavy investment in the main production line, downtime was still increasing. Thanks to our clarity, this was resolved with a new engineering management system that included preventative maintenance and root cause analytics.
Having packed constant and consistent performance into Standlake we exited with its new status firmly established – a showcase site and one of the most efficient egg packing centres in Europe.
“Coriolis make people performance an artform. In manufacturing environments like ours, nobody does it better.”
Love the sound of eggs-traordinary operational transformation?
Call the people-powered action-line on +44 (0)8452 26 33 64
or email us at: info@coriolis.co.uk
