Weetabix Food Manufacturer Winners

09/11/2011

Weetabix named Food Manufacturing Company of the Year!

Weetabix picked up the evening's top accolade at the 2011 Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards - being crowned the 2011 Food Manufacturing Company of the Year.

Weetabix were described as a beacon for excellence in food manufacture. Chairman of judges Paul Wilkinson echoed the thoughts of the whole judging panel when he remarked: "Weetabix is an absolutely fantastic story: everything from category management, to innovation and productivity. It is an integrated response to food manufacturing excellence." Weetabix also picked up the award for the Ambient Manufacturing Company of the Year.

Contact us to find out more about the Rapid Lean implementation at Weetabix
 

The Meaning and Value of Maintenance

10/10/2011

Would you like to improve the reliability in your plant? Have you ever made great strides forward in improvement and failed to sustain them? If so, don’t worry you are not the only one and the answer is right here.

The operation of the maintenance department is often not understood by Managers who are not Engineers themselves. In some cases engineering is seen as a necessary evil that spends too much money whilst not providing clarity on what value is delivered in return.

Through over a decade of experience building Maintenance Systems in World Class Companies we have developed our understanding of Maintenance and confirmed our belief in its value. All we need to do is show you how.

From studying Japanese approaches we know that they have a different concept of what Maintenance means. To the Japanese the concept of Maintenance is about sustaining performance and this ties in perfectly with the essence of De-Bottle Necking Method (DBM).

DBM broadly says sort out your speed, accumulation and speed restricting problems before worrying about your Availability. Impact workshops and the application of Rapid Lean tools can create a dramatic step change in performance in a very short space of time. After this the challenge becomes sustaining the new performance levels and this includes dealing with Availability.

The best approach for driving up Availability in manufacturing plants also stems from Japan and that is TPM (Total Productive Maintenance). The defining characteristic of TPM is the involvement of operators in the maintenance effort which gives them new levels of understanding and ownership of their equipment.

So does it work? We have worked with plants that have achieved levels of Availability of above 99.8% over the course of one year. Did they spend a huge amount on maintenance? No they weren’t spending any more than plants achieving 50% Availability and maintenance costs are normally seen to reduce during TPM implementation.

So if you would like to increase your plant’s Availability we offer Japanese trained expertise to help and together we will ensure the plant works when you need it to. Please contact us to find out more. An initial meeting costs nothing and could be the start of a future you can rely on.

OLAM Tomato Processors, California

05/10/2011

Lauras International is currently assisting OLAM Tomato Processors at their Williams plant in California on a continuous improvement journey to enable them to meet demanding targets. 39 million tonnes of tomatoes are processed worldwide every year. Global farming challenges, climate change, and the fact that the tomato is emerging as a super food, current annual growth is around 1 million tonnes which is a direct consequence of consumer trends.

The business is capacity-constrained, the challenge being to process and pack as many tomatoes as possible during peak harvesting, typically 84 days.

The Williams team have been trained in the core improvement tools, and are applying them to rapidly increase performance. One of the key observations by the senior team has been the engagement of the workforce who is demonstrating a motivated can-do attitude and is achieving significantly improved performance across key canning lines with half the season yet to go.

The continuous improvement initiative is currently being rolled out across other sites.

Nominations have been announced for the Foodman Excellence Awards

04/10/2011

The Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards panel has announced the finalists. This year, Lauras International is once again sponsoring the Bakery Manufacturer of the Year - congratulations to the nominees for that category: Genesis Crafty, Puratos UK, United Biscuits and Walkers Charnwood Bakery - and we would like to wish them all good luck.

We would also like to particularly congratulate Weetabix for nominations in both the Ambient Manufacturing Company of the Year category, and Training Programme of the Year

You can see who the full list of finalists are for the other categories by visiting the Foodman Excellence Awards website.www.foodmanawards.co.uk/page/2010_finalists.html

Congratulations

08/03/2011

Lauras International would like to congratulate Australian Business Manager, Duncan Munro, in achieving a Masters Degree in Engineering Science, with a specialisation in Manufacturing Engineering and Management.   Duncan has done a tremendous job to achieve this  qualification whilst simultaneously helping oversee growth of 85% in the Australian office.  Well done!