Food and Beverage

ROC has a great track record of working with clients in the Food and Beverage sector to help them achieve their business strategies in what is already a highly competitive environment and one that is becoming increasingly more so. That means having an effective HR system and processes to manage the workforce who, in many cases, have been brought together through extensive mergers and acquisitions.

Some of the industry issues we have helped organisations in the Food and Beverage sector deal with are summarised below:

• Workforce Scheduling – ensuring the right worker is available with the right skills in the right place at the right time, balancing flexible working requirements with production planning, avoiding having too many or too few staff, reducing agency spend and overtime costs.  These issues are especially prevalent in pubs and restaurants or where there are seasonal peaks and troughs (also relevant for manufacturing).  Workforce Scheduling tools can take advantage of potential employees that want to work specific hours or times (e.g. mothers).
• Absence Management – sickness absence rates impact profitability. Absenteeism means organisations have to pay overtime to cater for this or hire temporary staff to cover, or work won’t get done. For an organisation with 10,000 employees, every 1% of absenteeism means ‘carrying’ 100 more staff than required with obvious knock on effects on cost.
• Flexible Labour Policies – annualised hours can bring down the overall cost of labour but requires proper management and processing. The use of clocking terminals reduces production costs by eliminating the costs of unnecessary labour downtime. Proper agency labour management can also bring down external labour costs.
• Access Control – has become more and more of an issue especially in food and beverage operations where securing sites from unauthorised personnel is even more critical.
• Compliance with Right to Work legislation – ensuring that everyone who works for the organisation has the right to do so.  There are fines and/or imprisonment for Executives who are found to be non-compliant. This is a big issue when a factory is in an area with high staff turnover and a large migrant population.
• Process Commonality & Cost Effectiveness – a lot of these types of business have different processes in operation at different sites which means they tend to have a higher manpower bill (local HR staff) to compensate (the ‘only Fred knows how to do that’ syndrome).  As a consequence organisations employ more people than they need to, compared with if they operated consistent and streamlined (technology enabled) processes.
• Shared Services – once commonality of process is achieved, shared services can drive down the supporting costs through process efficiency and economies of scale. These might include finance and procurement processes as well as HR and Payroll.
• Terms & Conditions – in most organisations there are large numbers of different T&Cs (especially where business has grown through acquisition) which means employee groups are managed differently.  This makes the processes varied and as above leads to a more costly environment than need be.
• Cost of Labour Reporting – manufacturers keep a very close control on costs. This often means understanding on a day by day basis what the cost of labour is so immediate action can be taken.