A close attention to quality, costs and driving down wastage were key themes at the South West FG26/46 visit to NWF’s Wixland feed mill at Atherington.
The mill, which was purchased some seven years ago, has proved to be a va...
A close attention to quality, costs and driving down wastage were key themes at the South West FG26/46 visit to NWF’s Wixland feed mill at Atherington.
The mill, which was purchased some seven years ago, has proved to be a valuable asset in providing a local service to the South West, writes SW organiser Andy Jerrard.
It was a particularly interesting visit for some of the members of the group because, as customers, it helped to make another connection in that complex process which food production has become.
Our guide for the evening (Paul) introduced us to the basics of feed production. The visit began in a sensible place; the beginning of the process - the intake bays where all the raw ingredients for both blends and pellets are stored and then fed into the weighers via a telescopic handler.
The mechanics of the process were followed through from weighers to weighbridge via grinder, mixer, and cuber/pelleter. This didn’t involve a great distance geographically but did involve a considerable number of conveyors (we lost count at about 50).
At the weighbridge, lorries were being loaded directly from the plant as this enables them to be ready for first movement in the morning (often at 2-3am), and allows the capacity of the eight lorries to be used as extra storage ‘bins’.
Having seen how the process worked we were set to work in the classroom with no food until all questions were satisfactorily answered.
Mike Phillips, national group business manager took us through the history of NWF and its associated companies, all of which make use of a considerable amount of road transport. This has led to a central scheduling system for all the lorries with a real time tracking system, which has particular benefits for the feed mills at Wardle in Cheshire (NWF’s HQ – and a big mill) and Wixland (which is one-third of the size).
By measuring the progress of various loads it is possible to ensure speedy loading of the correct products at the mill, which leads to maximum utilisation of lorry capacity and correct scheduling of delivery times on farm. With a loading time of about 1 minute/tonne for the lorries and with a 0.1 per cent improvement in lorry utilisation leading to a bottom line increase of £70,000, the value of this can readily be identified.
It also allows for careful monitoring of fuel use on the lorries, varying from 9mpg at best to 6mpg at worst, and can also be used to identify training needs and the most fuel-efficient routes. A further benefit is the ability to divert empty lorries to back-load with straights without too much need for deviation from a straight-line journey.
The first brainteaser for the evening was to rank the outgoings of the business in size order. Raw materials topped the list at £18m, next came labour, closely followed by electricity. The latter two are well behind in size at £400,000 and £335,000 respectively. The difference keeping losses to a minimum makes – to any business - was illustrated by the fact that reducing raw material losses at Wixland by 0.01 per cent results in a direct increase in profit of £18,000.
One of the innovations NWF is using in the search to reduce costs is a system called overall equipment effectiveness. This system is derived from one Toyota developed in the motor industry and is perhaps an obvious candidate for the cross industry transfer of management techniques.
It is particularly important for somewhere like Wixland where the direct costs of a breakdown are some £108/hour without the cost of repairs or overtime to make up the production, but including electricity not used during that period. A figure calculated by the same means would be interesting for a breakdown within a modern forage harvesting system.
By measuring the availability of a machine multiplied by the performance multiplied by the quality rate, a figure called the ‘overall equipment effectiveness’ can be obtained. The equipment or production plant being measured can then be benchmarked against industry standards. However, as NWF is one of the first feed mills to use this system there is not a large amount of data to measure it against. What is known is that a world-class figure in general would be in the region of 90 per cent and Wixland has some room for upward movement.
A graphic illustration of how this can be used is that of reducing planned downtime by adopting ideas from elsewhere. The illustration of tyre changing on a car was used where, for the average motorist it takes minutes, for a Formula One team seconds.
Using this thought process for changing the dies on the pelleting plant reduced the time taken from about 45 minutes to 18 minutes; Changing tyres on the scraper tractor will never be quite the same again if this process is adopted!
Another novel tool was what looked like a vehicle rev counter, which showed each shift, the target production for that shift, and by the movement of the dial into either red or green, whether at that particular moment production was ahead, or behind. The introduction of this tool on its own led to an immediate increase in production of some 3 per cent on average.
After all this, the time arrived to see how efficiently food could be delivered and utilised within the office environment and using the formula; availability multiplied by performance multiplied by quality, a result of 100% was achieved to round off the evening in an entirely satisfactory way. The caramel squares were particularly satisfying!