Re-examining Manufacturing Processes in a Time of Pandemic Kale Cowper, Mallet Creek
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or certain small-medium sized meat processors, the COVID-19 pandemic has come with opportunity. Outbreaks in Canada’s largest meat packing plants has resulted in a ripple effect throughout Canada’s food supply chain. Cargill, JBS, and Olymel (among others) have experienced temporarily shut downs or reduced operations in an effort to contain COVID-19 cases within their workforce. Compounding the impact of these shutdowns is the increased demand across all retail food and beverage, due to more people dining in, and all operations having to navigate new safety protocols to protect against potential infection. The new production reality is one of face coverings, separation barriers, employee temperature checks, lunch/break room capacities, social distancing, and staggered start-ups. In the heat of this moment, many of Ontario’s retailers have begun to supplement meat supply through sources they may not typically buy from. And in that lies the opportunity for small-medium sized processors… if they can meet demand.
If a major grocer called up tomorrow asking for 50% more volume of your highest selling SKU, what would you do? Hire on more staff? Introduce a second shift? Attempt to quickly automate? While these may be legitimate options in some cases, they come with some pretty serious down sides: heavier reliance on temp agencies, lots of logistical and administrative planning you don’t have time for, large amounts of capital, perhaps even
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BlockTalk - Fall 2020
structural changes to your building. What might be more appropriate is a bit of lean thinking. Lean has become a buzz word in manufacturing. More often than not, it’s associated with a certain set of tools that production teams use to manage and improve their processes (you may have heard some of these strange words like Kanban, SMED, Kaizen, 5S, poke-yoke etc.). While these tools have their place, and can be incredible powerful if used correctly, they are nowhere near as important as Lean’s underlying principle. Simply put, Lean manufacturing is any production management system that actively seeks to eliminate “waste”. Waste meaning any human activity that absorbs resources but does not create value: mistakes which require correction, production of items no one wants so that finished goods inventories and work in progress product pile up, processing steps which aren’t actually needed, movement of employees and transport of goods from one place to another without any purpose, groups of people in the downstream activity standing around waiting because an upstream activity has not delivered on time, and goods and services which don’t meet the needs of the customer. By remaining dedicated to defining and eliminating waste a production system, processors of any size can find improvements that cost no money. The meat industry has a rich history in manufacturing innovation. The man behind the most influential manufacturing revolution in history, Henry Ford, was famously inspired by the processes of beef slaughter. The way beef carcasses move on rails from one process to the next, gave way to Fords mass production system and the invention of the modern factory. However, we no longer live in Fords world. The principles of mass production are not the answer to the problems of today’s small-medium sized meat processors, who are under constant pressure to produce a wide variety of SKUs in small production spaces, for razor thin margins. What is better designed for these types of production environments, is Lean manufacturing. The meat industry needs to be more focused on flexible systems that can accommodate the reality of their marketplace. Systems that can produce a high variety of products, with low amounts of labour, without the accumulation of large finished product inventories. COVID-19 may have brought to light the risks of an over-centralized meat supply chain and opened the door for small-medium sized processors to prove their capabilities to Ontario’s largest retailers. But to sustain, it cannot be business as usual. The future of the small-medium meat processor is one that wages a war on waste and does more with less! Adopting lean practices is not always easy – it takes dedication and an openness to learning new things. However, with issues in our meat supply chain being brought into the global conversation, now might be the time to begin to explore these ideas and start making positive change in your facility today. Kale Cowper Mallet Creek Group Inc. kale@mallotcreek.com 519 846 1830 www.meatpoultryon.ca
