OEE the Premier way

Posted on 10 Jan 2012 by Tim Brown

Premier Foods is the UK’s largest food producer, with over 60 UK and Ireland sites, around 15 thousand employees, and a £2.7 billion turnover. It’s no wonder then that Premier Foods has people with cohesive vision and a big agenda leading the organisation. This case study looks at Premier Foods’ world-class manufacturing strategy to understand how the organisation continues to significantly improve, year on year, using the Idhammar OEE System.

The Mission – Making Every Second Count with OEE
Following Premier Foods re-organisation in 2007, a new central Manufacturing Improvement team headed by Bob King, Group Head of Operational Excellence, embarked on a mission to ensure a systematic process (the ‘Premier ATTACK’ process) for Business and OEE improvement across the company. In 2010, in order to support this ‘Premier ATTACK’ process, the group launched a group-wide technical and training project to roll-out the latest version of the Idhammar OEE System to all divisions.

Bob King comments: “Idhammar’s OEE System is a powerful solution that plays an important role in supporting the world-class manufacturing required by Premier Foods.”

Delivering on the promise of OEE is no easy task, but Graham Paterson, Group Manufacruring Excellence Manager at Premier Foods insists that improving OEE is ‘always the right thing to do’. It takes a focused approach, the backing of senior management, the dedication of cross-functional staff and the right combination of technology and best practices to unleash the full potential of your manufacturing operation.

Benefits of OEE gains at Premier Foods

Using the Idhammar OEE System, Premier Foods has been able to quantify:
• Capacity Release – time-savings on each line enabling more sales volumes
• Labour Productivity- better running speeds producing same volumes faster
• Waste Reduction – less line waste through by improving reliability
• Energy Savings – producing volumes faster requiring less operating energy
• Lower cost per unit – making the product more profitable
These sustainable gains help Premier Foods to establish and grow a significant competitive advantage.

About Premier Foods:
Premier Foods is the UK’s largest food producer, with over 60 UK and Ireland sites, around 15 thousand employees, and a £2.7 billion turnover. A staggering 99.4% of British households bought a Premier Foods brand last year, and an estimated 47.2 million consumers have eaten at least one such product within the last fortnight.
About Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

In its most basic form, OEE provides a simple way to “keep score” of manufacturing performance using a simple calculation (Availability x Performance x Quality). However, the true power of OEE as a dedicated application lies in the ability to use it as a change-enabler, or tool for lean manufacturing initiatives.

About the Idhammar Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) System:
The market-leading Idhammar OEE System provides the foundation to measure, monitor and improve your Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), enabling you to discover previously hidden losses, cost justify improvements and monitor their impact on the bottom line. The Idhammar OEE System extends the use of OEE as a simple measure of effectiveness, to a vital management and decision support tool. From single to multiple production lines, and from one to a number of plants in a group-wide structure, the Idhammar OEE System is all you need to exploit the full power of OEE and achieve world-class lean operations.