Northern Foods, which supplies
millions of pounds worth of convenience foods to UK supermarkets
each year, said this week it was using IT to underpin its strategy
to cut cost and improve efficiency across the
organisation.
Stefan Barden, who took over as chief executive in February,
said that the company's strategy was to align IT across its
manufacturing sites and harmonise alignment between IT systems and
the business.
"Having systems structured in different ways might help an
individual site, but it means you cannot transfer skills and
learning, and you cannot look at the business at an aggregated
level," he said.
Announcing revenue growth of 2.6% for the first six months of
the year, as the company continues with a business recovery and
restructuring programme, Barden said he was looking for a cultural
change in the way Northern Foods views IT.
This meant a shift from automating old business practices to
regarding them as sources of information on how to change and
improve business processes to gain competitive advantage, he
said.
For example, he said real-time information enabled machine
operators to review each shift immediately and recognise easily
what needed to be done differently to improve performance.