PepsiCo not waiting for things to happen

PepsiCo UK’s factory in Skelmersdale, north west England, is one of the company’s leading sites in Europe.

The Lancashire facility, which makes snacks, such as Walkers Crisps, Baked Lays, Snack-a-Jacks and Monster Munch, has grown from a new site with one production line in 2006 to one housing five high-speed production lines.

For the past four years, the workforce, which includes over 600 employees, have been guided by the PepsiCo European maintenance methodology (PeMM), which has led to considerable improvements in areas such as unplanned downtime, planned maintenance, compliance and CARV (capital asset replacement value) - a cost-based metric used widely within food manufacture and FMCG industries.

Key to these achievements has been a drive to build up ‘talent’ across the organisation, according to site engineering manager Ian Rigby, who joined PepsiCo as a shift technician in 2006, having previously served 10 years as an engineer at H.J.Heinz.

“You may have the tools and the processes, but what you can’t do is implement a sustainable change programme without capable people and building capabilities at all levels,” Rigby said in a presentation at the recent Maintec show.

An important element of the PeMM programme is that PepsiCo employees are not only engaged in operating equipment, but also do quality checks and the majority of maintenance tasks, such as condition monitoring and lubrication.

“Today, you need to be agile and cannot be left waiting around for certain skills. We, therefore, build these capabilities into the blend of employees, both for today and for the future. All of our capability models are designed to satisfy those needs.”

So today at Skelmersdale there are around 160 front-line manufacturing technicians who, said Rigby, ‘own’ a particular zone - in-line with Lean thinking to optimise and ensure product quality and production reliability. These employees now complete over 90% of planned maintenance at the site.

During maintenance periods, frontline technicians remain in place to maintain their own equipment. This includes completing all the inspections and other tasks that they are skilled to do, such as changing bearings and belts.

Over 40 of these employees are trained in electrical skills, the site engineering manager also pointed out.

Prior to the introduction of PeMM, the PepsiCo operation already had well developed frameworks in place in the field of ‘operational excellence’, which covers areas such as health & safety, food quality, environment and manufacturing standards.

To address these changes the PepsiCo team is focused on how best to problem-solve and optimise the performance of its automated equipment. The options here are either to build up the skills of front-line technicians, or rely more on the OEMs.

“To do things in a cost-effective way, I don’t necessarily need OEMs, for example, changing bearings,” said Rigby. If this can be completed in the right group within our [team], it saves time and money.” He went on to comment, though, that “there is always a time for OEMs within our organisation.

“We have a strong ethos of sustained relationships, which is part of our core values, but we want to chose when we call on them to do particular specialist tasks.”

On a wider note, Rigby emphasised that the need for greater productivity and improved maintenance and reliability were ongoing requirements in manufacturing. This, he said, meant a continuing need to build up the capabilities of the workforce around these demands.

In addressing these industry-wide challenges, Rigby concluded that the role of engineers and maintenance professionals should be to build talent to satisfy the need for reliability and other operational requirements in a cost effective way.

“Looking forward, we are going to need an even stronger blend of skills to be able to make decisions at the point of action. You cannot wait for things to happen.”