Introduction

This document is both a playbook and guide. It examines how inputs (ingredients, packaging, energy, water, labour and training), process (operating practices and technology) and outputs (salable and unsalable products) fit together. These are defined as costs. To make a profit, operational efficiency is key. For that, you need a roadmap and plan to help navigate any challenges (defined as variables) you may meet. The roadmap illustrates a series of actions that get you from Point A to Point B, using technology. The game plan illustrates the tools, training and behaviour needed for that journey.

The journey is a sequence (input-process-output). The playbook aligns the skills, tools and behaviour for that sequence. The objective of using this sequence is to enable a business to plan for performance so that performance/productivity is implemented.

Variables

How the playbook drives a game plan is how variables are defined. This document uses the term noise to define the variables that reduce profits. Noise may originate in any part of the sequence (input, process or output). This is called local noise. Noise moves and can increase through inputs, processes and outputs where it is unmanaged. This is called continuous noise. By following the sequence (input to process to output) with tools, skills and behaviour (the game plan), continuous noise is reduced as the local noise is eliminated.

You are provided with guidance to optimize operations from start to finish. Unplanned downtime, utility use, human touchpoints, yield on inputs and the cost of waste management (the variables) are interactive. They affect each other to drive your margin and environmental performance.

This guide contains insights gleaned from decades of observation and conversations with food and beverage manufacturers, ethanol refineries, on-farm processors, feed mills, grain elevators, housed livestock operations and greenhouse operators. Energy audits, water audits, waste audits, studies and consultations have also contributed to this document. While the scale of a business determines the affordability of any single technology, the same game plan to reduce variables in manual, mechanical, automated and/or digitized processes applies. That is the roadmap.

The goal at the end of this journey is also the same no matter the scale or sector of a business – to make a profit on production with the lowest possible impact on the environment.

Roadmap detours

Running a food manufacturing plant, warehouse, feed mill, grain elevator, packing shed, livestock operation or greenhouse operation have are similar since they all use utilities. There are inputs, outputs and labour that must be managed. Similar mechanical, automated and digitized technology appears at varying degrees across the agri-food sector.

Managing any business may seem to involve constant problem-solving. The playbook is intended to help you navigate and see a path that may be obscured or not marked on your existing map.

There are five situations agri-food business owners and facility managers often find themselves in. These are best practices with great impact when the tools, skills and technology that are used align with today’s technology. The problem for many is to avoid unintended consequences. The five situations include:

  • Continuous energy audits: The established practice of energy audits to is higher an engineering consultant every two or three years to measure equipment and process efficiencies, then hand a list of ten or twelve projects to your staff to work on until the next time they show up. At the end of the cycle your utility costs have gone up.
  • Your lean team picked all the “low-hanging fruit”: One of the challenges lean practitioners find is that over time, it takes more staff time to achieve a declining rate of results. While this is a good thing, inflation never rests, and new cost pressures emerge. Some new tools and skills may be in order.
  • Automation failing to deliver expected results: Today’s equipment is built with sensitive computerized circuitry. These semiconductors are not designed to use unconditioned electricity like mechanical motor built between the 1940s and 1980s. When high-speed, high-volume computerized equipment is tripped, the unplanned downtime, damaged product and idled labour takes longer to get back up and clean up than it used to.
  • End-of-pipe solutions disagreeing with the bottom line: One of the costs of doing business in Ontario is the cost of compliance with environmental regulations. Non-productive outputs are a double indemnity. First, a non-productive output may be lost heat, emissions, wastewater and organic wastes that you paid to make. Second, you may be required to unmake them or at least collect and control them. The bigger the problem at the end of the pipe, the higher the capital cost will be to manage that problem.
  • The shell game of a lower-cost strategy: Technology adoption to avoid a single cost embeds risks. Automation can reduce labour. Automation without energy management has unintended consequences linked to energy reliability and energy inflation. The skills and tools linked to utility reliability and efficiency is the oversight that avoids unintended consequences.

The playbook provides insight on how to:

  • navigate these kinds of situations to get results that stick from outside consultants
  • supercharge your lean team
  • avoid technology mismatches
  • make less waste so that end-of-pipe solutions cost less