Hartley's Case study

“Unlike most consultants I have worked with in the past, Brian can in my view be classed as a true expert in his field, this coupled with his direct, no nonsense ‘world-class or nothing’ approach has had significant financial impact on our business and with his future direction I believe will have a great deal more to offer.“
John Pick, Site Manager

COMPANY PROFILE

JE Hartley Limited started in 1954 combining a long tradition of farming with the factory, built in 1975 to process and freeze peas and root crops.

Hartley’s Today

Like many companies following the banking crisis and subsequent recession, driving out cost and improving performance for Hartley’s is crucial if longer-term profitability is to be sustained.

Today Hartley’s are reaping the benefits of significant investment in freezer processing plant and the new 13,000 position cold store. It is now an agile and valued provider of quality ingredients and service solutions to complete recipe food manufacturers.

With a team of 50 employees the company is still very much family run with strong family values.

In early 2009 the Site Manager and the Engineering Manager undertook a training course facilitated by ICE Associate Brian Burgess giving an overview of Total Productive Management (TPM), and from that decided to embark of a full blown TPM programme starting with Measurement and Work Place Organisation, and moving on to install Autonomous Maintenance and Planned Maintenance within the key operations of the plant..

To keep the programme on track Hartley’s retained the services of Brian who has extensive experience of TPM and Lean Manufacturing who with MAS funding support delivered 20 days of consulting services.

Hartley’s have made good progress, and through challenging the advice given, and then taking it fully on board significant operational performance increases have been achieved, and are likely to be sustained. Importantly, they also see scope for even more improvements and are already planning to extend the good TPM practises to other areas of the plant, and also roll out a Focussed Improvement Programme led by the Managing Director (and founders Grandson) Tom Verity.

Through rigorous measurement of plant Overall Equipment Effectiveness, related AM and PM activities have been deployed to achieve real, measurable performance increases particularly on the process and repack lines, where the average hourly output has increased from around 2.3 t/hr to consistently over 4 t/hr, with expectations of making the processes even more reliable, and effective.

There is still much to be achieved, but following the processes has yielded greater than expected results, but also the confidence to go for more.