PROVING IMPACT TODAY Vanishing horizons
SPOTLIGHTING PURPOSE AND PROGRESSION Activating talent
Start specific with a long-term vision. By tackling tangible business problems, manufacturers can generate value quickly, building momentum to replace legacy technology without the risk of a full-scale overhaul. This prevents the need to ask for huge sums of money for a dream scenario, such as to transform whole systems, improve system resilience or become future fit: these are not business outcomes. With a vanishing horizon, over time technical debt is reduced with incremental implementation. It’s a better frame, bringing technical teams together where everyone is speaking the same language. The research programme highlighted a large bakery manufacturer as an example of this strategy. It was interested in implementing robotics, but it was still largely working on paper and, perhaps unsurprisingly, had issues with communication. The company decided to invest first in digital screens with Chromecast software. Overnight, this improved how everyone shared and recorded information. That momentum has since been used to install the right robotics as leaders realised they better understood what they needed to do with technology.
How can businesses, industry and the government rewrite the narrative on food and drinks manufacturing so talent realises the incredible innovations and new thinking taking place? “Food industry issues are just as interesting as those in automotive and aviation,” believes Dario Riccomini from Aldomak. But does talent know how interesting and multifaceted a career in the industry can be? Feedback from graduates suggests that food and drinks manufacturing rarely or never features in engineering courses. There is an opportunity for companies to feed their biggest issues into local universities and further education colleges to build food-specific content into science and engineering courses, to offer work experience and industry placements and to partner on hands-on research. Amanda Johnston, Co-Director, Advanced Food Innovation Centre at Sheffield Hallam University believes food engineering isn't understood as an academic discipline in the UK nearly as well as it is in other parts of Europe, the Republic of Ireland, and the United States. Added to that, it fails to attract talent because the food manufacturing industry gets such negative press. Promoting purpose Organisations in the research programme who were confident in their recruitment and retention strategies believe their success is due to their clear, compelling direction and strong purpose. Jason Rommer, partner at recruitment consultants, Wilton & Bain, agrees: “Attraction is helped by the scale and scope of work – is it truly transformative? Food and drink is hugely important and interesting to people outside their careers so why aren’t we all tapping into that potential?”
How do you get a data driven digital transformation off the ground in an organisation as complex and global as BP? One of the largest companies in the world, it took this ‘vanishing horizons’ approach to improve reliability and safety in plants. It started with connecting existing data sets in one platform to provide visibility and focus, bringing experts together to spark new ideas and thinking based on the data, creating a multitude of use cases that improve business outcomes and then improving data with the aid of sensors for these use cases. It’s enabled them to move from more reactive to preventative ways of operating to unlock value. To help a leading UK manufacturer of pastry and plant-based products understand store shoppers, Newton started by switching the company from Excel to machine learning to speed up calculation time by 1,000 times. We could then quickly cluster stores based on shopper missions, analyse product performance and spot and replace underperforming products. These changes led to a 3% net margin improvement. With all the focus on big data, it's important not to lose sight of the power of a well curated small data set and the value it can bring. Growing data availability and quality internally over time, supplemented by strategic data partners with relevant data can add value incrementally while modernising overall data infrastructure. For example, at one drinks manufacturer in the research programme, analytics allowed the commercial teams to see the operational impact of adding more lines, allowing a stock keeping unit (SKU) rationalisation programme.
Food and drink manufacturing challenges and opportunities rival any industry, and with a purpose to feed the nation and help tackle strategic challenges such as climate change and health, it offers incredible careers for modern and diverse talent. But the industry could highlight its value more, as well as ensure the sector’s challenges are embedded into education and training, producing technical, motivated, empowered talent at all levels. There is still more work to be done by manufacturers to showcase the fantastic career opportunities for young people with a wide range of skills – working closely with government and education providers. A recent industry- led campaign to attract new talent into the food industry, Mmmake Your Mark, is a positive example of what the food and drink industry can do to showcase what it has to offer. It could be built on further to attract highly technical and advanced manufacturing skills. Collaboration with technology companies can inspire talent into food and drink manufacturing. One of the food and drink manufacturers we spoke to, for instance, works closely with global technology product providers that will second their AI and data analysts to help grow their domain skills. Some of these people are fascinated by the purpose of the industry and stay on in the food and drink industry. Some of them return to the tech space, leaving with better expertise and helping create products that work better for the industry.
Building the business case with digital and data
Digital is an enabler, helping to build stronger business cases which bring together newer technologies and automation. It can reveal where to focus to achieve the next level of performance, although by itself, its impact is limited.
Businesses can overcome legacy infrastructure challenges by taking a long-term vision while implementing digital solutions iteratively and delivering tangible business outcomes.
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