It starts with safety

Three years ago, on his first day as plant manager at Ocean Spray’s Bordentown, NJ facility, Tim Haggerty tried to anonymously roam through the 500,000 square-foot facility. He succeeded. And that was the problem.

“I went through totally unnoticed,” said Haggerty. “No one challenged me as to who I was.” He observed the casual attitude toward safety and security, and made that his first priority for change at the Bordentown plant.

It wasn’t an easy call to make. There were many problems that needed to be faced at Bordentown. Declining productivity and lax maintenance practices left the plant teetering on the edge of disrepair and obsolescence. Change was needed, not to just reverse the negatives, but to pull Bordentown from the brink of extinction.

For Haggerty and his management team, it started with safety.

“Our mantra, which comes from our V.P. of Operations Mike Stamatakos, is that nothing we do is worth getting hurt over,” he said. “We had to change cultural attitudes. We told the employees we want to prove we were serious about their safety and well-being. And in doing so, we knew that they would begin to take us seriously about all of the other changes that needed to be made within the plant.”

In July 2007, that message was rewarded. The Ocean Spray Bordentown facility surpassed one million hours without a lost time accident. The plant passed 1.1 million hours in September, and its new goal is the corporate record of 1.6 million hours which was attained by the Ocean Spray Henderson facility in Las Vegas. Haggerty was also working at that facility when they reached their million hour mark four years ago.

The residual benefits of Haggerty’s leadership and his emphasis on safety have paid in other ways as well. “For some time, we had been missing our key metric of cost-per-case by 50 cents a case,” Haggerty said. “Last year for the first time in several years, we hit our cost-per-case metric.”

The change is seen on the bottom line, and on the production line. “It creates a definite cultural shift,” said Haggerty. “In defense of the employees who were here, when I started to ask, I was surprised to learn that the employees hadn’t had any semblance of a performance appraisal in years – if at all. One of the things I committed to was having a one-on-one with everyone in the plant. There were a couple of resounding themes. They wanted us to lead the organizational change, and they expected that people would be held accountable.”

Change came in many forms. Haggerty and most of his senior staff came from outside the Ocean Spray organization, and employees who weren’t willing to adhere to the new policies were held accountable. Or, as Haggerty put it, “The people who are left (today) were more amenable to change. They embraced the change. They wanted to feel appreciated.”

The immediate emphasis on safety was a strategic one. “The stark reality as a plant manager is that I have only two roles. One is to return workers to their loved ones every day in the same condition as when they arrived,” Haggerty said. “The other is to keep this organization viable so that the employees have a place to come back to tomorrow.”

There were several approaches to the safety strategy. There was a top-down analysis of safety protocol and procedures. There was a job site analysis of how work was being performed. Use of PPE was strictly enforced. It went beyond the hairnets, ear plugs and safety glasses expected in a food processing facility. It was bump caps, behavior-based safety observations, Lock Out/Tag Out/Try Out procedures and constant communications. Safety was enforced, at all times, everywhere.

The entire management team is held just as accountable as the line workers for safety, and expectations were raised up and down throughout the entire organization.

“There was peer accountability,” Haggerty said. “What had been acceptable practice was no longer the case. We had a fresh look at the risks that were taken.”

Even in a largely automated process, the Ocean Spray operation does have some inherent safety risks. The manufacture and distribution of liquid products requires not only strict adherence to FDA regulations, but also the use of liquid to wash down several areas in the facility. Wet spots on floors are not uncommon.

There is also the high-speed nature of the process. PET bottles are manufactured onsite for the juices under the Ocean Spray label, and a separate area adjacent to the plant makes Tetra Paks for Nestlé’s Juicy Juice brand. Annual volume at Bordentown has almost doubled in the last three years, and the facility is now poised to take on even more volume in the future.

Succeeding at safety made it easier to attack the other major shortfall at Bordentown. The maintenance strategy three years ago was reactive at best, and machine breakdowns were treated without a certain sense of urgency. There was no organization in the parts area and no scheduling to do preventive maintenance.

The job for changing that fell to maintenance manager Phil Camerota. “One of the significant challenges of turning around the maintenance group is that these are people who feel like they are professionals by nature,” Camerota said. “If we wanted to challenge the maintenance group, we had no chance unless we recognized that.”

The defining moment for the maintenance department was, of all things, a fire in the maintenance building. Rebuilding from the fire gave Camerota the chance to rebuild maintenance processes and procedures from the ground up.

Today, tools and parts are organized and catalogued; the dingy gray of the space is replaced by white walls and bright lights. A full maintenance schedule is posted each day. More importantly, the maintenance staff is engaged daily with the machines they repair as well as with the operations personnel who run those machines. The staff is on the production lines daily, checking with workers to see where problems are, and manning the lines themselves to listen with trained eyes and ears for signs of future trouble.

“If you talk to the mechanics now, there’s a different swagger about them,” Haggerty said. “They know their responsibility is to keep the plant running all the time. We tell them the person who runs that line is the mechanic.”

The pressure to change wasn’t because of outsourcing or foreign pressures. The need to change Bordentown came because Bordentown was underperforming. Change succeeded because Bordentown’s management and employees responded to the opportunity to change.

Bordentown’s employees don’t just wear the idea of safety and productivity on their sleeves; they wear it on their back. A nine-point manufacturing improvement plan is on the backs of navy-blue t-shirts with the Ocean Spray logo on it. Productivity, safety and production data are posted throughout the facility, giving employees each day a snapshot of how safety and productivity gains are measured, celebrated and challenged toward continuous improvement.

Ocean Spray is synonymous with cranberry juice, and there are few better places on the planet to grow cranberries than along the boggy shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The Bordentown plant, located on 62 acres midway between Philadelphia and New York, is strategically located to take advantage of that geography.

Almost all that is left of the former Ocean Spray Bordentown plant from three years ago are the exterior walls. Those walls, first constructed in the late 1800s for a worsted wool mill, have housed Ocean Spray production for more than six decades. Inside the walls, the history is evident, and yet change is everywhere.

“If you see nothing else today, you see the remnants of the old facility,” said Haggerty. “When you come today, this is the worst the plant will ever look. When you see it tomorrow, it will look better. There is always incremental improvement.”

Now there is talk of expansion, with warehouse space being converted to additional Tetra Pak lines and increased output in the bottled juice area opening up the chance to add an additional production line.

“We wanted the organization to act like this is a world-class organization,” Haggerty said. “The employees deserve all the credit for that.”