1. Project Management Case
Study for David Hewitt
Customer Profile
Greencore is one of Europe’s leading food businesses, supplying major
retailers and foodservice providers with a wide range of ingredients and
prepared food products from manufacturing facilities across the UK and
Europe. With annual revenue of $2.2B and 8,000 employees, Greencore
is an acknowledged leader in the provision of convenient, premium
quality product.
Business Situation
To support a 3-year group-wide cost reduction imitative Greencore had
historic operations information for senior managers on a weekly and
monthly basis. However, they lacked intelligence for people on the shop
floor to drive real-time action and take ownership of their own
performance. Specific areas of improvement focus included re-work,
changeovers and downtime.
Solution
Greencore chose CDC Factory, a manufacturing operations
management solution from CDC Software.

2. Benefits
5% reduction in direct labor costs
Restructured production schedule, minimizing the number of
required clean-downs
Elimination of various product re-works
Reduced changeover durations
Production line speeds adjusted to optimum level
Identified and fixed specific causes of downtime
Background
Greencore Group plc is one of Europe’s leading food
businesses, supplying major retailers and foodservice
providers with a wide range of ingredients and prepared
food products from manufacturing facilities across the UK
and Europe. With annual revenue of $2.2B and 8,000
employees, Greencore is an acknowledged leader in the
provision of convenient, premium quality products.

3. Business Challenges
The company had recently kicked off a three-year cost
reduction initiative which included improving factory
efficiencies, product innovation, customer on-time delivery
and standardizing best working practices. Through a
series of strategy review meetings CDC Factory was
introduced as an out-of-the-box technology enabler to
support all these key initiatives. When Greencore’s
Operations Director David Gallagher first saw a
presentation of CDC Factory he understood the benefits
immediately. The opportunity to integrate real-time
production operations with quality assurance processes
and improvement campaigns driven by the factory floor
could not be overlooked
“We wanted to try and reverse the usual relationship, so
that pressure to make changes is being driven upwards
throughout the organization,” said Gallagher. “What we
were looking for was something that was easy to use but
would also supply the kind of information that a shop floor
can use quickly. We had a very strong opinion that it had
to have a holistic approach – it had to connect the shop
floor to what the management system was doing.”

4. Solution
Greencore’s $100m annual revenue cake and desserts
manufacturing facility was chosen as the first of Greencore’s
factories to install the groundbreaking CDC Factory
manufacturing operations management suite. The plant was
opened in 2000 and was designed as a one-stop source for
its customers, combining high volume production with
premium hand-decorated product.
Greencore had already developed an operational suite of
performance information that provided the senior
management team with what it required to make week-to-
week and month-to-month decisions.
“What we lacked,” says Gallagher, “was information for
people on the shop floor that can affect the next five
minutes. I’d have to say on reflection that CDC Factory was
the only one that was anywhere near holistic – the
alternative systems we evaluated were just too disjointed.
We absolutely felt that there was an immediate cultural fit
with what we were trying to do.”
And from the outset, it was clear that the product would live
up to some pretty high expectations - as David Gallagher
says; “It does exactly what it says on the box!” The first

5. Results
Re-work – Greencore’s premium-quality hand-decorated
cakes must leave the factory in pristine condition and
occasionally an individual product will not meet the required
standard and has to be re-decorated, or re-worked. This was
one area in which the company wished to see significant
reductions, and analysis of re-work in CDC Factory revealed
a number of opportunities for improvement. For example, the
data showed that many un-decorated cakes were damaged
from placement on racks, where they were stored temporarily
because the hand-decorators could not keep pace with the
volume of product coming through. These products were only
subsequently restored to the process during the next gap in
throughput. Once this cause was established, not only was
the production line speed adjusted to the optimum level, but
bottlenecks in raw materials delivery at the head of the line
were addressed to ensure no more “gaps.”
Another issue identified through analysis of data provided by CDC
Factory was significant variation in the consistency of the icing
applied to certain cakes via a sheeting machine. By addressing

6. Changeovers – With so many different SKUs produced on site, the length
of time taken by operations personnel to clean down and set up a
production line for a new run varied considerably. In order to identify
opportunities for improvement in this area, analysis of changeover data
provided through CDC Factory was carried out with the full involvement of
the production planning and scheduling team.
This analysis led to a restructuring of the production schedule, in which all
similar colored SKUs are produced in the same time period, thus
minimizing the number of required clean-downs. Additionally, CDC Factory
identified opportunities to save clean-down time through ongoing self-
cleaning of the conveyors. A small modification to the production line
provided this and further reduced changeover durations by cutting the time
required for a full clean-down.

7. Downtime – One of the zones in Greencore’s dessert manufacturing plant
produces 4 million cakes in time for the Christmas season, so being able
to identify the principal causes of manufacturing downtime is crucial. In
one production area, for instance, a recurring downtime • • cause entered
in CDC Factory was “Waiting For Mix.” To solve this problem, an additional
mixing vessel was installed, together with a cross-feed pipe to the
depositor. The result was that mixture could be prepared continuously and
fed in to the production line as required, eliminating costly “Waiting For
Mix” downtime.
Culture Change and Ownership
The project has already engendered a number of important cultural
changes within the business. “We were very clear with the shop floor
workforce that the intention was to allow them to come up with new
ways of working and bringing their ideas forward. We wanted them to
spend less time just coping and more time actually improving - they
have embraced the empowerment that CDC Factory gives them,” says
Gallagher.
He has also noticed a change in his own role. “I am now much more of
a ratifier of the improvements that take place in the plant than I am an
instigator. Previously I would be a prime mover – now it’s much more
’Tell me what the options are, yes I think you’ve chosen the right one,
go ahead and do it’. And that’s exactly what we set out to achieve.”

8. Equally importantly, CDC Factory has delivered all the projected
financial benefits. “In a market sector where costs are rising
unavoidably, CDC Factory has helped us minimize those effects for
our customers through a 5% reduction in direct labor costs.”
The next phase of the project, which will see the implementation of
CDC Factory at two further Greencore sites is already being planned.
David Gallagher is thoroughly optimistic looking forward. “From what
I’ve seen so far, I’d say that in the future I’m going to be quoting this
project as the best one I did as Operations Director of this company!
It’s certainly changing the working day for people here and I’d
wholeheartedly endorse it.”
To understand how we can accelerate your MES and continuous
improvement initiatives with CDC Factory, contact us to learn more
about our unique Performance Review Service—a 3-day workshop
that pinpoints specific areas of improvement, cost reductions and key
performance metrics relevant to your factory.
“ It’s the people who work with a system that make things
happen, and CDC Factory is the most useable of any system
I’ve ever seen. ”
David Gallagher
Operations Director