Harry’s Fresh Foods

Harry's Fresh Foods is a manufacturer of fresh (never frozen) foods (www.harrysfresh.com). Harry's was founded in 1978 and entered a period of rapid expansion in the mid-1990s as consumers turned to convenient and fresh foods. Harry's serves large and small grocery and food service organizations across a wide geography, with a variety of demand patterns. The frozen entree market is extremely competitive, with large suppliers and well-entrenched distribution channels.

The key to Harry's success and rapid growth are freshness and variety. They produce everything in small kettles Just-In-Time to satisfy customer demand, managing short shelf lives with little perishability waste. Because their processes are flexible and their test kitchen so creative, Harry's can bring new and creative products to market much faster than their competition, quickly satisfying changing and regional food preferences while rapid developing specialized products on request for their larger customers.

In 2002 Harry's built a state-of-the-art processing plant designed for the smooth flow of materials from fresh, dry, and wet ingredients, through preparation, staging, cooking, packaging, and out the door to their customers. Soon after this plant was put into operation, they began the search for a new ERP system to help manage their significant growth.

As we investigated the requirements for this new system, we discovered that this brand-new plant was operating below expectations for total throughput. We quickly discovered a constraint. Although their prep and cook lines were optimized for small batch production, the more traditional packaging lines—with multiple package sizes, flavor and allergy sequencing, changeover, and cleanout issues—limited their sequencing flexibility and throughput.

Harry's elevated the importance of the constraint management and scheduling portion of their ERP selection criteria and implemented constraint-based scheduling (CBS) in phase 1, going live with the entire system in just 120 days. Just like their production, the project team at Harry's was committed to small batch software implementation. According to Brad Paris, Vice President of Supply Chain for Harry's Fresh Foods, and project manager:

"We have two machines that fill one type of container, these machines are the bottleneck. One machine is twice as fast as the other. Traditionally, we thought the most effective way to manufacture was to use both machines simultaneously until we obtained the volume we needed. This created a relatively short burst of production that generated large throughput numbers. Intuitively, we thought large throughput generated the most efficiency and least cost.

"However, when we ran CBS in this scenario, it suggested that we spread the production out over a longer period, utilizing only the more efficient machine. At first glance, this was in complete contrast to our phiolosophy of small batches and maximizing total throughput. However, after studying the results, we discovered that CBS was suggesting that we utilize all the capacity of the most efficient machine (the constraint) before using the slower machine. Once we understood this philosophy (and studied the upstream and downstream processes to ensure there would be no disruption in the production flow) we decided to give it a try in production. The results were immediate. Our expectation over time is to get the same output with 15% fewer man hours, and we continue our setup time reduction efforts to increase our flexibility.

"CBS has also helped us to balance our production scheduling. We have seven fill lines that feed three chill lines. So there is always a balancing that needs to occur to maximize the chill lines by switching production efffectively among the fill lines. This coordination requires a significant effort since we regularly run over 50 products per day. By using CBS, we are able to establish load limits for each fill line that creates the most effective use of our chill lines. Now, the system will not allow our schedule to become unbalanced, which will ultimately result in an increase in throughput of over 20%.

"Finally, CBS helped us sequence our production based on certain characteristics that we have assigned to our products. For example, some of our products contain allergens which require a time-consuming cleanout of machinery before producing the next item. By assigning these changeover times to the different combinations of characteristics, we can use CBS to sequence all of our production in a manner that minimizes overall change over time. To date, we utilize different combinations of 7 characteristics per finished good to create the optimal sequence of production. This process resulted in a 12% reduction in overall downtime.

"Since we clearly identified our throughput constraint and made this a priority for our ERP implementation, in less than 120 days we began to see the enormous benefits of constraint based scheduling tools. We have introduced minimal scheduling and execution complexity, while creating substantial production efficiencies and cost reductions."