Premier Foods Engages Workers to Drive Operational Performance with Poka

In March 2024, our Ashford site began a proof of concept of Poka's connected worker app on three of our production lines. Our goal is to address the challenges of worker engagement and, most importantly, retention. While Premier Foods pays operators well, we must remain competitive and continue to improve their pay. The only way we can do that is to train them to be more technical operators and empower them to drive operational performance.

Premier Foods has multiple disconnected systems, but no solution for engaging its operational colleagues in real-time because they are not connected. We are still using notice boards and TV screens to communicate with our shop floor colleagues which requires them to stop and read, which they usually don’t.

We also don’t have a system for engaging with Gen Z or the emerging Gen Alpha on their terms. What I’m brutally aware of is how the younger generations prefer to be engaged and how everything is consumed on a mobile device. Poka does the best job at giving people an option for how to communicate and learn, whether that be video, text, or by speaking to someone.

Poka is an end-to-end system that supports the full Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, which is at the heart of what we do in manufacturing. It supports learning and development, work instructions, forms, checklists, issues management, troubleshooting, and communications. Other systems that we looked at weren’t. They were just SOPs or work instructions.

Also, Poka is extremely easy to use. It is designed for factory workers from the ground up. The proof of that is when I first had Poka set up and I walked onto the shop floor with a tablet. I just handed it to a couple of operators and said, “Here, have a look at this. Tell me what you think.” And within five minutes they went in and figured out where everything was. They didn’t need me to show them anything.

First, Poka allows all of our shop floor colleagues to be digitally connected with each other and to the rest of our organization. It allows communication to flow in real-time from the very top to the bottom of the organization, and visa-versa.

Further, using Poka’s skills management piece, we can plan what our workforce needs to learn to be competent. We have that all mapped out in Poka and each of our shop-floor colleagues can follow their Career Pathway in Poka to access all the training content and work instructions they need.

Moreover, workers have immediate access to digital work instructions within Poka. We don’t need to print out hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and store work instructions in a binder in a cupboard somewhere in a production facility or in a manager's office, where the only time they see the light of day is when there's an audit by a third party.

Our plan is to integrate Poka with a number of our legacy systems via an API so that data can be sent back and forth.

Further, we’ve started recreating some of our paper forms in Poka to test its digital form capabilities. When workers complete a form a Poka, the information is sent to Ignition, the manufacturing execution system that we use to gather data from our production lines, and we can see the number of forms that have been completed, the number of forms in deviation, number of forms out of compliance, number of user engagement.

The evidence that we’ve received to-date is that operators who aren’t normally involved in changeovers or fixing machines are automatically grabbing a tablet and completing their skills, which is unheard of.

And this is possible because the micro-lessons in Poka are so accessible on the shop floor. Also, operators are giving us input on how to revise the work instructions. As people work their way through them, they are identifying things that aren’t quite right. So, we're now revising those documents to make them more effective.

So, one of the biggest points for me is that Poka democratizes our colleagues on the shop floor. It engages them. It gives them the ownership to drive performance at the shop floor.

Two of the line managers in our Poka feedback session commented on how great it was that they could use their computers to immediately access up-to-date skills information about their team members.

Before, they had to walk out of the factory and into another building to see the training coordinator so that they could look at the skills matrix in Excel, or have 10 or 12 conversations to understand what skills a person has.

That whole process and conversation would take an hour at minimum. Whereas now it's immediate. I open Poka, look at my team skills matrix, and it's there. Done. So, the amount of time that everyone saves in a day is huge.

Because our SOPs will now be created, shared and updated electronically, we will eliminate paper and printing costs, and reduce the time to get SOPs in the hands of workers.

It's really easy to evidence how long it's going to take us to actually write SOPs across a whole factory really, really quickly. Because we have that kind of data now about how long it takes to create an SOP, how long it takes to create a form, and therefore, where we're looking at reducing the time and cost of creating and sharing SOPs.

Poka will also help us to identify and resolve issues more quickly and cost effectively. Each line per production run has anywhere between seven and 10 paper forms that operators must fill out. All those will be filled out electronically in Poka so paper and printing costs will be eliminated.

If there’s any non-conformance or deviations, Poka will immediately send our quality assurance team a notification on their mobile phone and then they can follow up with that operator on the production line straight away. Further, our quality team will no longer have to review hundreds of pieces of paper and manually enter the data into Excel.

We will also use forms in Poka to help operators complete autonomous maintenance checks. The continuous improvement teams can then analyze that data to see when things are moving or sliding out of tolerance. They will have better data than they have right now.

Worker Feedback

• “It’s easy to use.”

• “ I can find everything I need really quickly.”

• “I was really anxious about having to use computers. I still am. But Poka is much easier to use than I thought it would be.”

• “It’s great that I can read things in my own language.”

• “The forms are so much quicker to do than the paperwork”

• “I can see what skills I need to learn, instead of having to ask someone,”

• “Being able to grab a tablet and get on with my training is great if the line has stopped”

• “It’s so much better than constantly having to find someone to ask questions.”

• “I love that we can edit SOPs in real time. We’re the ones that know what’s happening on our lines and if something has changed.”

Management Feedback

• “As a manager, it’s so easy to see how my team's getting on with their training rather than having to ask the training (team) or navigate through loads of folders online to find the information.”

• “I can see my whole team's skills, and then I can go and speak to my team about their training.”

• “I can immediately update something straight away if it's changed. It's so much easier.”

Our pilot trial of Poka has been very successful. We received positive feedback from all workers that we spoke to, and saw first hand the impact on our operations.

This includes:

• Increased worker engagement

• Strengthened relationships between managers and workers

• The ability to track worker skills in real-time

• A reduction in the time and cost of creating SOPs and forms

• Faster identification and resolution of non-conformities

My recommendation now after having piloted Poka for a few months is to launch with the daily management module first because you get a very, very quick ROI and payback.

There's massive, massive benefits of digitally connecting all of our plants and workers around the world using Poka. For example, an engineer who has hit a bit of a brick wall in terms of trying to resolve a problem, being able to put a call for help on Poka’s Factory Feed:

“We've got this machine down here. Has anybody faced anything similar?” I'm sure that with the collective brain power of the whole group, we'll be able to resolve issues more quickly and effectively that way.

So, from a continuous improvement point of view, from an issues resolution point of view, it's going to be incredibly powerful to connect all 5,000 of our people.

One important lesson that I learned is how vital it is to have both the executive leadership team at head office and the senior leadership team for the site involved and highly engaged with the Poka project from the get-go. Also, get IT involved early in the project. If you don’t, it’s more difficult to get consensus on the best way to move forward.

Having a clear vision of what you want to achieve, one that drives the business forward by engaging and empowering colleagues, is critical.

Then, you need to map out your current reality in terms of what you need to build versus reinforce versus destroy. Only then can you map out the steps required to move from your current reality to your vision.

Also make sure you have dedicated resources to the project. Although setting up the parameters in Poka is relatively quick and easy, sorting out your policies and procedures takes time.