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Food and drink sector 

£850,000 saved by Scott-Grant

A major food manufacturer needed accurate data to assess whether they could derive sufficient benefit from an investment of £850,000 to install a new conveyor system. A number of variations to the packaging had been introduced to respond to different retail spaces available in supermarkets, filling stations etc. The need to increase capacity and throughput to meet demand had resulted in their engineers constantly increasing the speed of the conveyor system, thereby putting undue pressure on the bearings and rollers in the switching mechanism. Our objective and experienced productivity specialists were able to calculate the conveyor capacity and to identify the best utilisation of the current equipment. Using accurate and consistent time standards and other industrial engineering techniques they were able to prove there was no need for further investment.

Food and drink sector
A food manufacturer needed to get 15% more throughput using existing equipment and headcount, so Scott-Grant productivity specialists looked at quicker changeovers, optimising process times and established that there was a bottleneck in the production process. They reduced a lot of handling, provided data that challenged and improved planning policies, they reviewed shift patterns - and achieved the overall objective.

Food and drink sector
A food processing and packaging plant saw an 18% reduction in labour costs by a Scott-Grant specialist implementing improvements to their batch production methods. Opportunities to reduce waste, address material shortages and create better product flow were also identified.

Manufacturing sector

Massive investment yet to realise planned capacities

A high volume manufacturer was operating their manufacturing process in line with Lean principles and had a matrix of time values for all their different activities for manning, planning, costing, targeting etc. They had justified the need for a lot of new plant but found that their recent investment just hadn’t created the planned capacities. It took a Scott-Grant productivity specialist to help them identify the cause, viz that they didn’t know which were their critical operations. By reviewing as much of their time data as possible, our specialist was able to replace it with time standards to enable them to identify the bottlenecks in the manufacturing process and improve and release further capacity.

Manufacturing sector

Realising the benefits of capital investment

Having invested a lot of capital in new equipment to improve production capacity, a UK manufacturer was particularly disappointed when no significant improvement resulted in their flow line facility.  They decided to review all time standards to re-balance their activities and flow so invited Scott-Grant productivity specialists to do the work.  During the project they identified and removed a few bottlenecks, reallocated work, improved methods, allocated some extra resource in one instance.  The result was that the manufacturing process exceeded previous expectations, delivered an ample return on the investment – and improved productivity by about 16%.

Retail sector
A sizeable retail business needed to have more structure and transparency of transaction costs and staffing levels across their sites. Building a MOST^® database for the business by Scott-Grant productivity specialists created detailed costs of all activities in major stores. This in turn became a suitable basis for determining accurate staffing levels and budgets – and even for calculating the impact on staffing levels to react to changes in the sales mix.

See more examples

• Automotive, Commercial, Construction, Distribution
• Process, Public, Service, Transport