All questions are based on the following case study. Make sure that… All questions are based on the following case study. Make sure that y

All questions are based on the following case study. Make sure that… All questions are based on the following case study. Make sure that your answers are discussed in relation to the case study.In the canYou’ve probably heard the saying that ‘what gets measured, gets managed’. At Kraft Heinz, they believe that what gets measured, gets improved. Kraft Heinz is a global company that manufactures three main types of food products: sauces, convenience meals and infant nutrition products (baby food). It was previously known as Heinz but was taken over by Kraft in 2015. The company employs more than 41,000 staff worldwide and generates over US$26 billion in sales per year. To facilitate continuous improvement to its products and processes, Heinz (as it then was) developed the Heinz Global Performance System (HGPS). The HGPS was designed to establish a globally consistent approach to improving productivity and embed it in the organisation’s culture. The system has two elements: (1) improving productivity at each factory, and (2) establishing a global system for managing performance improvements across all the company’s factories. In individual factories, the HGPS improves productivity by fostering employee ideas about minimising wastage and loss, improving production scheduling and planning, maximising the use of manufacturing assets and reducing downtime. The first step is engaging and empowering the entire workforce to focus on continually improving efficiency and productivity. This involves teaching staff how to engage in continuous improvement processes, training work teams in problem-solving techniques and training improvement facilitators to act as change leaders. Then a site assessment determines the opportunities for improving factory productivity through techniques such as a loss and waste analysis and identifying profit improvement projects. Monitoring productivity has enhanced creativity and problem solving The global system tracks the performance at every individual factory, including its progress in implementing its roadmap and achieving productivity improvements. This allows the company to compare the performance of factories in different locations and lets individual factories benchmark themselves against other factories in their region. Within two years of its introduction, the HGPS was being used across the company’s operations in Europe, North America, and Asia, including the four Australian factories in Echuca (Victoria), Wagga Wagga (New South Wales), Mill Park (Melbourne) and Northgate (Brisbane) and its benefits for enhancing productivity were already becoming apparent. At the Brisbane factory, improvements have been particularly dramatic. The factory produces canned pineapples as well as bottles and boxes of pineapple juice. It has a permanent workforce of 400, which swells to 600 between February and June – the peak of the pineapple season. The HGPS has instituted a new focus on constantly monitoring performance and improving processes. Before each shift, team members meet to discuss the achievements of the previous shift, calculate savings achieved by productivity improvements and address any issues that affected production. In the factory, charts display hourly production rates, and red, green and yellow colour markers indicate how production levels are tracking against targets so that employees always know how the factory is performing. Improvements made under the program have directly increased pineapple yield – the amount of the pineapple that goes into the can or bottle – saving Kraft Heinz $4 million per year. But the biggest changes have been to the culture in the factory itself. Encouraging staff to focus more closely on productivity has generated a new emphasis on creativity and problem solving in which employees are more comfortable making suggestions about ways to improve production processes. So much so that the Brisbane factory has ‘gone from the bottom of the ladder to playing in the finals’, according to Simon Leonard, Kraft Heinz’s general manager of operations, and winning ‘Factory of the Year’ two years running at the company’s annual awards. Business Management Human Resource Management Share QuestionEmailCopy link