When family-owned Melbourne bakery and retail franchise Ferguson Plarre Bakehouses moved into a new greenfield facility a few years ago, it had no choice but to completely rethink its operational approach.
The move from an old outdated bakery to a facility four times the size clearly revealed the old processes wouldn't work if the company wanted to meet the product quality and the efficiency levels required.
With that in mind, the industrial bakery, which supplies 60 Ferguson Plarre-branded stores with bread and cakes that have been baked fresh daily, decided to adopt workplace organisation systems S5 and Lean under the guidance of consulting firm TXM Lean Solutions.
Michael Plarre, the operations manager, and the fifth generation of the Plarre family to lead the business, says the implementation resulted in a crucial change – a shift of ownership of quality and efficiency from management to individual staff members.
Every individual owns their own space in terms of cleanliness and organisation, he says, and Lean has focused everyone on an exact process.
“Everything has its place and is going back in same place every time, and we are now in a position of never having to clean the bakery for an inspection,” Plarre says.
“We had an awful lot of wasted time with people running between departments. And with 65 metres from corner to corner of the business, if you have to run from room to room to simply find tools, equipment and ingredients, over a period of a day, that can waste 15 to 20 per cent of your available time."
Once this was in place, the company applied the model to the process of managing the lines by setting scales of efficiency against those lines, to bring the efficiency and practices into a Lean model.
According to Plarre, although 5S took time to install, and get the hang of, once mastered it was simple to roll out a set of protocols that touched on all key areas: food safety, occupational health and safety, problem solving, and quality control.
“It gave me a terrific structure to work with and it also gave the teams an exact structure to work on with their staff, so it provided an avenue of communication which greatly simplified the business.
“Now the place is spotless, so it's a pleasure to work in and there's a lot less noise," he says.
“Even on super busy days, which used to be chaotic, it's very quiet and peaceful, and that generates efficiencies.”
Wages, for instance, were 10 per cent cheaper, and raw materials were seven per cent cheaper, says Plarre – and the bakery halved its raw material waste.
“Because every line has a set standard by which it's measured every day, it's very simple for me as an owner and manager of the company to walk through each department, and it's very clear for me to see where we have wastage and why.”
“By building all the processes in the bakery and building the levels of ownership in the staff, I've been able to remove myself from production and focus on the retail landscape.”
Next up, Plarre says, was the extension of Lean protocols into other areas of the business such as the retail network and administration.
According to Plarre, although the tools are fantastic, the hardest part is getting people to understand and acknowledge the value within the tools. In the first few months there's a lot of push-back, he says.
“But once they've installed it and done it and reaped the benefits of it, they live their life by it. It simplifies things greatly, so if someone messes up and doesn't follow a process, the staff are right on them – so the staff control the process completely.”
