WMG and Made Smarter West Midlands work creates efficiencies worth over £125k for Shropshire based food manufacturer

The Challenge

If a business is growing, it will get to a point where it just cannot manage its systems on an ad hoc basis. This was the case with the Ludlow Nut Company Link opens in a new windowin Shropshire, a small artisan producer of healthy food that was seeing big increases in demand for its own products as well as its white labelling service for other brands.

Helen GrahamLink opens in a new window who co-founded the business in 2014 said: “I think we had got to the stage where we had become too big to maintain our efficiency through our previous system and that was the key for us. The worst thing is when you are about to start making a product and you realise you don’t have a particular ingredient because that causes lost time and re-shuffling other orders.”

The Solution

Through the Made Smarter West Midlands programme, Denis PelychLink opens in a new window, digital manufacturing advisor at WMG worked with Ludlow to get the go ahead for a grant towards a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) software-based system.

Denis said: “We helped the Ludlow Nut Company to understand the business risks associated with their previous approach to IT systems via a simple architecture diagram and an options and implications session. We coached their Project Manager, ran weekly meetings and then handed back to the Project Manager once they were feeling confident.”

Their new system allows them to track stock from the goods-in stage through to recipe production, packaging, and finally dispatch to customers.

Impact

The efficiencies noted because of the system include:

• 30% reduction in time to process orders and plans
• 10-20% reduction in management time compiling reports (re-focused on strategy)
• 10-20% reduction in non-value-added admin, expediting & error correction
• 15-20% productivity improvement from shop floor data capture
• 5-10% reduction in downstream manufacturing waste (fewer errors)

This amounts to total savings of 125k per annum and equates to extra capacity to improve the company’s bottom line.

Read more here about the project and the results here.

For more information about working with WMG's SME Group email wmgsme@warwick.ac.uk