PREMIER FOODS UK

Premier Foods UK

Premier Foods UK

Introduction

Premier Foods is the UK's Largest food manufacturer with well know brands such as Hovis, Mr Kipling, Bisto, Branston, Batchelors, Quorn, Sharwoods, Cadbury Cakes, Ambrosia, Loyd Grossman and OXO. The £2.6 billion turnover company employs c. 17,000 people on 60 sites across the UK and Ireland. 99.4% of British households buy at least one Premier Foods branded product each year and 43 million people eat our branded products every two weeks.

In August 2006 Premier Foods acquired Campbell's UK & Irish business taking the group's turnover from £760 million to over £1 billion. This was quickly followed in March 2007 by the acquisition of RHM, which further increased the turnover to over £2.3 billion. These two significant acquisitions created step changes in the company's scale and provided an opportunity to review the Grocery manufacturing base and determine the optimum footprint to maximise efficiency and cost effectiveness going forward.

During 2008 Premier Foods successfully completed one of the largest and most complex food manufacturing operations, restructuring programmes in the UK. The objective of the programme was to create an operational footprint for the Grocery Division that delivers scale with competitive advantage through lower cost and higher technical standards. This was delivered by reducing a 21 grocery site footprint to just 12 sites within one year. The restructuring included:

Closing eight manufacturing sites from Sep 2007 - Dec 2008

investing in increased capacity and capability at five core manufacturing site

Transferring more than 1500 products and 2000 materials (136,700 tonnes)

£47m of capital investment delivering £19m in savings

The closing sites produced many well known brands including, Saxa salt, Sharwood's sauces, Paxo stuffings, Bisto gravy, Be-Ro flour, and Robertson's spreads. These brands are loved by consumers and supplied to a very wide range of retail and wholesale customers including all major supermarkets. A key requirement of the programme was therefore to maintain high levels of both customer service and product quality.

Premier Foods: Quality Journey

During its acquisition of RHM in January 2007, the company realised that it needed to review its data quality whilst updating product information for some customers on the GS1 UK Data Pool. With just one customer, it found 300 products with data inaccuracies. Premier Foods decided to carry out a feasibility study on the quality of its product data to discover how it could better meet the needs of its customers. The study found that following the mergers and acquisitions, the company had 14 data pool accounts with 14 different groups of staff and updating Premier Foods product information onto the data pool using different ERP and technical systems. This complex process resulted in wasted staff time, cost and poor product data quality.

The company decided to set up a centralised data pool team to ensure that all its data is updated into the data pool using a single account with a standard process in place. A data cleansing exercise was also carried out to ensure that all the product attributes were accurate, up to date and available on ...