A New Direction at College Park
Talk to people at the College Park plant, and you see right away that they're excited. Yes, upgrading a plant
is plenty of work--especially when daily orders must be filled--but, as College Park shows, it's also energizing and rewarding.
Throughout the plant, there are
signs of rapid progress, as well as great pride in what's been
accomplished in just a few short weeks.
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| Operations
Manager Clark Dobbs has introduced new procedures and controls at
College Park, and is very pleased with the plant's progress over the
last 10 weeks. |
For Wayne Farms, the plant is
both the first major acquisition since 1997 and an important step
forward in the company's growth. Purchased from Sylvest Farms in
September, the plant significantly increases the higher margin,
value-added side of the company's business. It also provides the
opportunity to work with Applebee's, Chick-fil-A, and Outback
Steakhouse--three of the fastest-growing companies in the national
accounts segment.
In addition to supplying
these companies, College Park serves a range of smaller customers and
ships about one million pounds of finished product per week. In
contrast to other Wayne Farms/DQH facilities, it also combines deboning
with marination, par frying, and other further processing.
"This makes us something of
a hybrid operation," says Clark Dobbs, the new College Park Operations
Manager and the former Operations Manager at Pendergrass and Decatur.
He adds that the plant has an especially important role since it is
able to process fresh poultry from the Enterprise and Danville
complexes. In this way, it adds significant value to fresh product that
would otherwise need to be sold on the open market.
Improving Procedures and 'Changing the Culture'
As might be expected, integrating the
plant into Wayne Farms has been a complex process, one that's required
new ways of thinking and working for most of the facility's five
hundred employees. Clark notes that part of this effort has been to
improve every day procedures, especially in such areas as receiving,
inventory management, and statistical process control. However, the
more difficult task has been "changing the culture" and getting people
accustomed to a new company.
"In some cases, people
weren't used to being held accountable in the way we expect," says
Clark. "They had to see that we had different requirements, and that
our goal was to exceed customers' expectations." At the same time, he
believes that most people have welcomed the change. "We're showing that
we're going to commit the necessary resources to this facility, but
we're also raising standards. We've put process controls in place, and
we're expecting people to take more responsibility for their own work
and the work of their departments."
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| Finished
product on its way to Wayne Farms customers. College Park combines
deboning with further processing, and ships nearly 1 million pounds of
poultry each week. |
As the plant's new manager,
Clark has tried to make this transition as smooth as possible, but
admits it hasn't always been easy. When Wayne Farms first took over,
for example, inventory was "practically nonexistent"--just at a time
when most customers were increasing their orders for winter. "With no
inventory, we just had to keep running," Clark recalls. "We didn't have
the luxury of shutting down to study the problem."
Another difficulty involved
the consistency of tenders coming out of the par frying operation.
Here, Clark and his team traced the problem back to portion control,
and brought in new equipment that would produce tenders of the right
size. "The par frying operation was a big issue for us," says Clark.
"We've managed to resolve 95% of it at this point, and our customers
seem to be very pleased with what we've done."
Balancing Competing Demands
As this makes clear, much of Clark's
time in the first months has been devoted to troubleshooting--often
simply making sure that orders meet basic standards and go out on time.
"You want to be focusing on long range improvements," says Clark, "but
sometimes you end up fighting fires all day." He notes that doing more
pro-active work usually means less reactive work down the road, but
adds that balancing these demands--and finding time for both--is
probably the toughest part of his job.
Of course, Clark hasn't had
do it alone. He's had help from a team of experienced managers,
including Melissa Raybon, Darrell Elliott, Juan Urquia, Shane Davis,
Deborah Brown, and Roberta Lovett--some based permanently at College
Park and some from other Wayne Farms facilities. In most cases, the
visiting managers had six to eight weeks of daily involvement at the
plant, teaching new procedures, setting up new systems, and providing
help with H.R., accounting, and other matters.
"People in all our
facilities have been extremely supportive. We get calls and e-mail
every day from people asking how they can help and how everything is
going," says Clark, who has also tried to emphasize good communication
with other Wayne Farms facilities, especially with Enterprise and
Danville.
"I think people here have
realized that they can benefit by forcing those roots to go out and by
making personal contacts at other facilities."
While there's still much to be done, Clark is extremely pleased with the plant's progress so far.
"We've resolved most of the
issues we had in the first few weeks, and we've definitely improved our
output and consistency," he notes. "People are also starting to take
ownership of their work, so there's been a huge change. There's still a
lot to do, but six months from now, we're going to be a fundamentally
different operation."