Focus on Food & Drink – Facing up to current challenges

Continuing cost pressures from UK supermarkets, discerning consumer demands, the need for increasing quality and product safety throughout the supply chain, value for money and innovative products are just some of the challenges faced by Food & Drink (F & D) manufacturers.

The adoption of ‘Lean thinking’ approaches are helping our clients to combat these challenges whilst reducing costs, improving and delivering consistent, high quality, compressing the time taken to get new products to market and advancing business performance and profitability.

At S A Partners we have a team of experts working with F & D companies in the UK, Ireland, Europe and beyond, delivering real benefits to our clients.

Previously, we have introduced Jeff Williams, Partner and Head of the F & D Sector for S A Partners and Andy Brunskill (link to Andy’s bio), Principal Consultant.

This month we would like to introduce Juliette Packham, Partner and Account Manager for a number of leading F & D manufacturers and retailers on New Product Introduction and Development (NPI and NPD), lean improvement projects and coaching programmes. Juliette has also designed ‘Lean Academy’ training programmes for a number of clients resulting in the sustainable capability development of internal talent.

In recent months she has been instrumental in delivering benefits such as:

• Transforming 2 F & D businesses in the fresh meat and agriculture sub sectors from ‘Bronze’ to ‘Silver’ status, in line with a high end retail customer’s Manufacturing Excellence and Supply Chain quality standard
• Line optimisation demonstrating 30% capacity uplift (in fresh produce)
• Juliette is currently working on NPD in ‘Ready to Eat’ introducing improved gated and visually managed process.

Juliette specialises in off the shopfloor processes such as planning (has just delivered a 25% raw material stock holding reduction in fresh meat), and is currently in the middle of a planning/supplier development optimisation programme aimed at reducing wastage in fresh produce by 2.5%. She is also revising an NPI process for a major glass manufacturer which is a sub supplier to the F&D sector, helping them to streamline and optimise their process and reduce lead times by 15%, which benefits the F & D supply chain as a whole.
Why not take a look at some food & drink case study examples, showing how Juliette has been instrumental in helping companies improve their performance and profitability.
If you require more information about our consulting, training and coaching services to the Food and Drink sector, please contact Jeff Williams by e-mail.