Case study – Stewart Hollis, Lyons Seafood
Lyons Seafoods based in Warminster are part of the Alfesca Group of companies. Alfesca is a leading European producer of premium festive and convenience foods and have 3400 employees operating across 5 production sites in five countries.
Lyons Seafoods’ business is processing, sourcing and sales of prawns and other speciality seafood to the retail, food service and manufacturers in the UK and Europe.
During the last 5 years there has been a £5m investment in automation and capacity expansion, the £4.5m factory development has been completed (2006) giving Lyons a state of the art manufacturing facility, large chillstore and modern office accommodation.
The interim role was to begin 12 months prior to the new facilities being completed; the initial brief was to address some of the ongoing warehouse/stores issues namely:
1. Eliminate stock collation errors
2. Stock count errors and poor pick rotation
3. Eliminate stock discrepancies
4. Minimise stock write on and write off
5. Organise and restructure where necessary.
Initial investigations revealed there were reasonable systems in place; minor improvements were required but organisation and structure along with supervision improvements would prove to be the key issues where long-term benefits would be achieved.
The first stage was to re-focus the supervisory team into a more facilitative mode of operation and then set up a self managed collation team with a new role being created, which was titled Senior Operator. There were two main reasons behind this move:
1. Geographically it was difficult for the existing team leaders to manage effectively this process
2. The necessary change from a team leader who managed to one who facilitated the processes.
All members of the team were involved and regularly updated as to the progress; standards started to improve, Stewart saw this as inevitable: “this is always the result when you involve the people concerned in the decision making process”. The CEO soon recognised it was all about getting people on the side of the business and recognising once this is done, improvements will follow.
What were the results? Stewart eliminated collation errors, stock rotation and discrepancies became a thing of the past. One measure of the success was that Lyons was put on the Sainsbury’s Heroes board on a number of occasions a testament to the hard work of all members of the Lyons’ dedicated work force, but especially the stores who never failed to deliver an order to independent distributors. Paperwork errors were at an all time low at 99% accuracy, the cost per pallet reduced due to the team ethics improving morale and generating performance improvements and depot claims were reduced by 50%.
Looking back, Stewart says“This was just part of the work carried out at Lyons, for me it was an extremely exciting and rewarding time - to see the efforts of the stores team develop into tangible improvements was very satisfying and I will not forget the people at Lyons who proved once more that a businesses strength is within its people.”
Stewart Hollis, Hutchinson Interim Manager 2007
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