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View from the Top - Part 2 | Part 1
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COMPANY FILE
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Founded in 1946, Sundora Foods is the UK’s largest processor of tropical and dried fruit. It provides 600 products, with 80% of its output going to major supermarket chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s. The other 20% goes to the food service industry – mainly through catering suppliers.
Sundora is part of the Harrington Food Group, to which it contributes annual turnover of £32 million. It employs 150 people in the UK.
The business model at Sundora covers the import of fruit and nuts from sources worldwide, then washing, cooking and preparing the raw material as appropriate. Finally it packs, warehouses and distributes the finished product.
Processing and packaging take place at Sundora’s factory at Pocklington, near York. Raw materials are drawn from offsite stores nearby at Full Sutton and at Bridlington which is slightly more distant. Once packed, the products are warehoused at Full Sutton before being shipped out to Tesco and Sainsbury’s distribution hubs or to other distributors.
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Q: WHAT BENEFITS HAVE YOU GAINED - AND HAVE THESE MET EXPECTATIONS?
A: A key aspect is that we used to be planning today for tomorrow. Now we certainly have a lot more control. We have a weekly plan in place by the Thursday of the previous week which means that we can get materials in place.
In the past, on occasion we might pack materials in the wrong film – say, organic items in non-organic film, materials from the southern hemisphere packed in film stating a different country of origin, and this led to unnecessary wastage as the goods needed to be re-packed. Now we have checks in place to prevent that.
We are also working on the basis of future demand, not past stock levels. We have seen a lot of benefits in terms of smoother flow, less stock holding and less shortages.
We have been tuning the system over the last six months, focusing on forecast management and making sure it is accurate, we have got to be very specific in our forecasts.
We are getting more out of the same plant machinery, with less overtime. We are producing and selling more than we did. It’s also improved our information – we can cost forward much more reliably and we can extract profitability information about each product which we weren’t able to do before, so that we are starting to rationalise the product base.
This is where I think fully integrated packages fall down. They are good in areas like transactional control and providing basic financial information, but when it comes to slicing and dicing information they are very weak. That is where you get the benefit from best of breed.
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Conspectus 2003
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Copyright © 2003
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