With Manufacturing Leaders' Summit (16-17 November) fast approaching, we caught up with Richard Lloyd, General Manager at Accolade Wines, The Park, to get a preview of his keynote speech at this year's event.
This summit is for the C-Suiters of the manufacturing world, with exceptional, case study based content, which is delivered by some of the best industry orators from around the globe. Over the two days key strategic, business and technical challenges will be covered and debated, and leaders will be able to network, discuss and engage with their peers. Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit is the go-to event for 2022 for anyone working as a manufacturing organisation with a turnover greater than £100m.
Richard has been instrumental in establishing the sustainability strategy at Accolade Wines, The Park – a finalist in the Sustainable Manufacturing category of The Manufacturer MX Awards. The company has found innovative ways to manage waste streams and has made some key strategic partnerships within its supply chain to assist with visibility and the measuring of environmental impacts. This is all underpinned by technologies that are accelerating sustainable growth, which is the key theme of this year’s Leaders’ Summit. I sat down with Richard to hear more about his keynote speech for this year.
What will your keynote at Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit be about?
The elimination of waste and sustainability obviously go hand in hand. The keynote I’ll be giving will be around how you can use advancements in digital technology to support leadership and the workforce in attacking those wastes. What I mean by that is we’ve got a really engaged workforce who have a deep driven purpose to be part of a really sustainable business. We’re finding ways where we can accelerate that reduction in waste by some of the technologies.
What technologies are we talking about here?
Something that we (Accolade Wines at The Park) are really making progress with is 3D printing our spare parts. We were doing that a year ago, and I was really proud of this. There’s a lot of sustainable benefits; we’re not bringing the parts in from around Europe, but the really impressive bit is that it’s enabled us to use closed loop – we’re using a waste stream within our facility.
Our facility is zero waste to landfill, so when we have some plastic that comes into the factory, we can now use that plastic waste stream to make the filament that we then 3D print our machine parts with.
Online printing has also been a very interesting advancement for us. We fill around 50 million cases of wine a year, and currently a very good partner of ours prints those cases at another facility. We asked them to produce 400 different case designs, because every brand has its little nuance, we therefore end up with material obsolescence, because designs will change and sales will change. We now take a fairly plain case and with online printing capability we print on to the case, not just text of the wine varieties or bar codes, but graphical images as well. This means that we have the ability to produce exactly what we need, as opposed to forecasting.
How key have supply chain partnerships been for your business?
On the digital side, we want to make sure that everyone on site has the best information to take the right focused action. We’ve partnered within the supply chain with a couple of businesses that have really helped us understand our energy usage on site. This has also helped us with our machine performance by bringing the data out of these machines that, data we’ve had for years, but it’s now being presenting in a much more usable way.
We’ve taken Artificial Intelligence and applied it to historical data over a previous 12 months, then put that together with the performance of a machine over the last couple of hours. The system is very clearly showing us what we should go and have a look at. All this has come about from us going out and partnering within the supply chain with other businesses. It’s about opening your door and saying ‘come and work with us.’
Data is obviously crucial to supply chain visibility and measuring sustainable growth – as long as you manage it properly, right?
Data can really sink you sometimes, businesses collect so much of it. It’s easy to fall into a trap of where you have X amount of reports being generated daily or weekly, but what actions are people actually taking from it? If you’ve got a KPI, you’ve got data and you’re not acting on it, I would really challenge that. For us it’s been about finding a way of really making that data information clear. A computer can use an algorithm, take historical data and then present three hours data and say actually, we’ve seen this before, this is what you should do.
Your people have really embraced and bought into your sustainable ambitions. What has been key to getting them onside?
I think in people’s personal lives, it’s gone up the agenda, and it’s in the media much more. People make very conscious decisions when they’re out buying goods for themselves. I think therefore, it’s important for an employer to meet that hierarchy of need. What we’ve done is we’ve given people the opportunity to create the change themselves.
Every single one of these projects I’m talking to you about has a huge number of cross functional people who have brought it to life. You can imagine the satisfaction they have that when they know they’re delivering a reduction of CO2. When you give people the opportunity to work in projects where they can make a material change it becomes self-fulfilling.
What are your hopes for this year’s Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit?
I’ll be blunt – I hope to go and nick some ideas. Whilst there’s a number of ideas that the team here have come up with and adapted them to our world, it will be fantastic to hear from that many industry people and leaders.
It’s just an amazing way to go and sit and listen to something that’s probably really diverse, and at first view is probably not linked to your business or to your industry. But I’ve found that’s often where some of the best ideas come from. I think what you guys have set up is a great environment for people to go and learn and collaborate.
Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit would like to thank: For more insights on Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit, listen back to the latest episode of The Manufacturer Podcast