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Case studies

Relevant service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence
Reading time 0 minute(s)

Building Enterprise Excellence at Worldwide Fruit

About the Company

Worldwide Fruit Limited is an international fruit marketing and distribution company that supplies the UK’s largest supermarkets.  Worldwide Fruit have a commitment to being both sustainable and lean, to creating value for their customers throughout their supply chain.   

Zero waste is one the organizations strategic pillars and Worldwide Fruit has been working with S A partners since 2011, to develop their understanding of Lean practices and processes and how they can continually improve. 

Their approach to learning has been to ‘grow our own’. They have invested in training and development, using the S A partner belt system which is affiliated to Cardiff University. This ensures they are all aligned and delivering the same objectives. In 2020 there were 200 good ideas. Everyday, someone, somewhere in the business is delivering an improvement. 

The Challenge

Fresh fruit packaging and distribution is a highly competitive and challenging marketProduct management and processing is subject to high levels of waste and the speed of turnaround required to ensure products reach supermarket shelves in optimum condition requires a highly scientific approach. This coupled with staff shortages and increasing pressure from supermarkets to reduce costs led Worldwide Fruit to embark on a Zero Waste agenda. Working with S A Partners they identified a program to build capability in Lean and Continuous Improvement. 

wwf
Company
Worldwide Fruit

Industry

Size

450 Employees

Revenue

£220 Million

Category

Website

What We Did

S A Partners supported the development of a Lean Training Academy which went on to deliver LCS Level 1A Lean Awareness Training to 100% of employees; and 38 LCS Level 1B Green Belt and their journey continues. This team also supported the development of a Model Line; the introduction of OEE as a key metric; Strategy Deployment through tiered meetings and the development of a new supplier framework. 

Creating capability and building a culture of continuous improvement were fundamental to the deployment of the program.  Whilst building lean and continuous improvement skills were important the company wanted to ensure that change was sustainable and the focus was on behaviors and not just tools.  

Key actions included: 

  1. Developed a Culture of Continuous Improvement 
  2. Identified critical success factors and KPIs to measure performance. 
  3. Prioritizing improvement projects for continuous process enhancement. 
  4. Trained 27 Green Belts & 5 Black Belts to  support the use of Lean Tools & Techniques and enable the team to solve problems. 
  5. Provided coaching support and supported the development of Leader Standard Work across the entire operation. 

 

 

I’m incredibly proud of the team here at WFL who have enabled the business to achieve M&S Gold status. The support from S A Partners has been invaluable.."
Steve Maxwell
CEO

Results

  • ROI of Lean Training: 1,434% 
  • Trapped benefit delivered by the Lean Business System and Enterprise Excellence Program: £3.327 million 
  • 59 hours of capacity created removing overburden 
  • Trained over 27 Green Belts, 5 Black Belts 
  • Leader Standard Work across all areas of the organization 
  • Clear KPI’s and KBI’s were introduced to manage performance.  
  • Tiered Management System to support strategy deployment and CI 
  • Suggestion scheme/Idea’s program introduced 

Framework

To deliver the transformation at Worldwide Fruit S A Partners supported the deployment of the Enterprise Excellence Model and framework across the business. We also worked with Worldwide to build capability and confidence across the team.  More recently we have started working with Worldwide Fruit on their Digital Transformation program.

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