Case Studies - Cadbury

“Improvements so far in maintenance have had far reaching effects…[with] significant improvement in plant performance, reliability and waste reduction right across the UK operation.”

Cadbury has a long history of continuous improvement within manufacturing and four years ago maintenance and engineering came under the spotlight.

Cadbury was keen to raise all of its manufacturing processes to world-class. In the area of maintenance and plant reliability Cadbury employed MCP who benchmarked their performance and helped Cadbury develop a maintenance improvement program.

“The success of the maintenance improvement initiative was due in large part to support from the Cadbury board,” said Alister Jones, asset care manager at Bournville. This support ensured a continuous focus through the program. The content and implementation rate of the program was agreed through a steering group who also ensured that best practice was shared across all the UK sites.

“There are three sides to making change: the people, the processes and the systems," explained Alister Jones, and all these needed addressing.

“Throughout the history of Cadbury we had been reliant on tradesmen who were skilled in one craft, and who were used to dealing with maintenance in a reactive way. But we were now working with very different plant - very high tech, fast, computer controlled and modern. We needed a radically different approach.”

Now the way that maintenance is treated is different. There are very structured down times, which are driven by the maintenance needs for each piece of equipment. It is planned in advance, which has resulted in a military style operation, with the best possible use being made of machine downtime.

“It has been a long evolution to put the systems and support in place so that the tradesmen can manage their own plant. We designed a process to allow tradesmen how to make the first pass at structured maintenance plans for plant,” explained Alister. Cad bury also implemented a CMMS program to help manage the workload, and waited for tradesmen to volunteer to be trained in SAP so they would be able to deal with the admin side of maintenance. The result of this re-structuring of the maintenance function has resulted in Cadbury no longer using plant engineers.

The final part of the evolution is modernizing the facilities available to our tradesman. By closing the traditional remote shanties and creating work centers that are part of the production environment.

“There are no quick answers to making changes like these,” Jones emphasized. “You must do what you feel is right for your business and your situation and use Best Practice to your own advantage. When it comes to maintenance, you and your operation must get used to change being the only certainty”

“Improvements so far in maintenance have had far reaching effects," he finished. "We have even seen a significant improvement in plant performance, reliability and waste reduction right across the UK operation.”