Apetito
Location
Trowbridge, Wiltshire | United Kingdom
Job description
The Role and Team
You will be supporting the manufacturing team to support in the implementation of a continuous improvement program throughout manufacturing to deliver innovative solutions to bottlenecks in the food manufacturing process and develop the capabilities of the team through support and coaching. You will be working on a variety of projects that add value to the business and can make huge difference in every aspect of it, being given responsibility to drive business improvement.
You will be required to support complex manufacturing processes and deliver solutions to improve the performance of our manufacturing facility. You will then work with the team to ensure that the solutions you develop are integrated as a part of normal operations.
This role involves a balance of spending time in the factory – speaking to the team and measuring processes, and working in the office – analysing data, improving spreadsheets, and automating operations.
Who We Are
apetito is the UK’s leading supplier of food to the health and social care sectors. All of our products are manufactured from our 24/7 factory in Trowbridge in Wiltshire. Servicing over 400 hospitals, 450 care homes and thousands more through our work with Local Authorities, we produce delicious, nutritious and sustainable meals for people at home or in care. Through our food we look to ‘make a real difference’ to all our customers, up and down the country.
This role forms the core of our Graduate Development Programme. Full details on the programme can be found on our careers pages at apetito Graduates. In this programme, you will have wide exposure to senior management in the business, participate in Graduate Insight days to give you experience into their roles.
Our Values
Established in 1958, as a family-owned business, our values sit at the very heart of what we do. We are proud to be a business that makes a real difference, committed to producing great food to be proud of. We have developed a range of products designed to enhance health and wellbeing for all our customers. We are proud supporters of British food and farming and focus on using the best ethical and sustainable produce.
We are driven by a passion for service, dedicated to feeding some of the UK’s most vulnerable people, offering healthy and delicious meals to customers across the UK.
Ethical & Sustainable
As a business which operates within food manufacturing, we believe we have an obligation to make a positive contribution on society. We are a member of The UK’s Plastics Pact, an initiative looking to transform the plastic packaging industry in the UK. We have recently launched our circular supply chain initiative through our Collect and Recycle scheme. We now collect used trays directly from our customers and return them to our packaging supplier, to produce new, directly recycled trays. This closed-loop initiative is the first of its kind in the world.
We have also made a commitment to our employees – we’re recognised as an accredited Living Wage employer by the Living Wage Foundation. Joining an elite group of FTSE 100 companies and public sector organisations.
To act as a change agent, improving the performance of the overall manufacturing operation by aiding in the delivery of the continuous improvement programme. You will be responsible for working with the operations team to understand the root causes of specific problems impacting the Manufacturing operations, develop solutions and processes to resolve this, then train and support the teams with this change. In practice, the improvement of the operations will be done through a variety of projects including continuous improvement, lean, digitization, and coaching workshops.
Being an established factory with some operators working here for over 40 years, you will be required to work with the team to understand issues affecting the operation. Listening, brainstorming, and motivating them to work towards the business objective of excellent performance. Performance outcomes will often not be delivered directly by you, but instead through the team which you will be coaching towards improved performance.
This will require you to learn, develop, and practice skills in lean, 6-sigma, and project management. You will apply traditional process improvement techniques such as 5S, root–cause analysis and applying DMAIC steps to your projects/objectives in order to drive improvement.
There is also the opportunity to simplify processes with innovative digital solutions, working with the team to automate manual processes with the use of Excel, programming, and the Microsoft Power Platform.
Both of these avenues for improvement will only be possible by working with the team on the shop floor. Working with them to understand gaps in performance or knowledge, sources of frustration, and opportunities for improvement. Acting as a communications conduit to feed their concerns and ideas up to the senior management team, and feedback the responses by communication or direct action.
Essential:
You will have a 2:1 degree or above in an Engineering/Mathematics/Sciences related discipline.
This role will require time to be spent on the shop floor to understand problems, so you need to have experience being “hands on” in an operational environment. You also need to be comfortable talking to both the production operators and the management team. This will ensure engagement and understanding of any projects which will be introduced.
The other aspect of this role will require data analysis to understand the source of problems, and what to focus on. As such, experience working with data and computers in order to identify and analyse patterns and trends to support further work is essential.
In this role, both formal and informal training will be available to develop specific technical skills. However a basic understanding of factory operations and lean principles is required.
What is most important is to be keen to get involved in a dynamic factory environment, to drive improvements in an area, and to then work with an existing team to share knowledge and develop their skills to make the overall operation simpler, safer, more consistent, and more efficient.
Desirable:
Prior experience or knowledge in the following areas is desirable:
· Lean manufacturing and 6-Sigma
· 2D and 3D CAD modelling
· Working in a food production environment
· Programming in any language
Personal Qualities:
We are looking for someone who is passionate to learn and develop in manufacturing, specifically in food, who will be looking to deliver the best quality products for our customers. The successful applicant will care for the development, performance, and wellbeing of the team – acting as a leader who the team can trust to act with their and the company’s best interests in mind.
The successful applicant will be a self-starter who would rather be too busy than not busy enough. If you find something which doesn’t feel right, you won’t ignore it, but will instead ask “why?” or “what can I do?”. You will need to be happy to speak to teams on the shop floor to better understand their problems and feed these up in order to resolve them.
The successful applicant will be able to work well in a team environment and have a structured approach to work. You will need to feel comfortable working with staff at all levels, and communicate effectively in meetings, presentations, and written reports.
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