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JohnsonDiversey wins Prestigious Manufacturing Excellence Award

Extract from CleanPoint
Monday, July 04, 2005

JohnsonDiversey has been named overall winner of the government-backed UK Manufacturing Excellence (MX) Awards 2005. The company was judged to have clearly demonstrated world-class performance in all areas of its manufacturing operation at Alfreton, Derbyshire.

This JohnsonDiversey plant produces a comprehensive range of cleaning chemicals for use by UK contract cleaners and facilities managers in industries as diverse as food service, lodging, healthcare, government & education, and retail. Products from the plant are also widely used in the food processing, dairy and brewing industries.

A key factor in securing the MX Award was that the factory has been able to more than triple production since 2000 to 90,000 tonnes per annum, while simultaneously increasing the number of products made at the site from 350 to over 550 in the same time frame.

The Alfreton plant has also won praise for its commitment to responsible manufacturing. As with all the company's 38 sites globally, the Alfreton factory is committed to quantifiably reducing the impact of its manufacturing process on the environment. This is achieved through lowering total water and energy consumption, reducing waste through reuse and recycling, and cutting the amount of biodegradable ingredients lost in to the wastewater stream. Reinforcing this, JohnsonDiversey has recently become the first manufacturer of industrial and institutional products to be successfully accredited by AISE, the European trade organisation developing a charter for sustainable development.

Commenting on the award, Ian O’Connor JohnsonDiversey’s Supply Chain Operations Director said: “The reason that we have won the award is directly attributable to the whole team at Alfreton. This success has been driven by their expertise and a culture of continual eagerness to develop new ideas that can improve processes and avoid problems. I believe that the judges saw this goodwill of our people as being the one enduring strength of our business”.

The MX Awards triumph continues JohnsonDiversey’s run of major competition and award wins in 2005. In March, the company was shortlisted in a record four categories and won the 'Washrooms' product innovation award for its Oxivir disinfectant in the 2005 Cleaning Industry Innovation Awards. Similarly JohnsonDiversey’s new SafePack chemical dispensing system was judged outright winner in the Cleaning & Hygiene Suppliers Association Innovation award earlier this year while a second JohnsonDiversey product J-Flex was also Highly Commended in the same competition.

A further recent groundbreaking technology was Jonmaster which became the first cleaning system to be approved for use in the Government’s Rapid Review programme that is fighting the MRSA superbug.

The MX Awards programme, which is run annually by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and is government-backed through the DTI’s Manufacturing Advisory Service, includes the most rigorous benchmarking procedure applied to companies in the UK manufacturing sector. This includes months of assessor site visits, best practice reports, formal presentations and the scrutiny of a panel of manufacturing industry experts chaired by Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya KB, CBE.

Extract from Ripley and Heanor News,
Thursday, July 07, 2005

“An Alfreton Business has been crowned overall winner of the government-backed UK Manufacturing Excellence (MX) Awards 2005. JohnsonDiversey was judged to have clearly demonstrated world-class performance in all areas of its manufacturing operation.” “The Alfreton plant has also won praise for its commitment to responsible manufacturing”. “Ian O’Connor, Supply Chain Operations Director, said: “This success has been driven by the whole team at Alfreton, their expertise, and a culture of continual eagerness to develop new ideas that can improve processes and create solutions for their customers”. “Amber Valley MP Judy Mallaber said: “When I visited the factory I could see how well everyone worked together as a team and this clearly shone out to the judging panel. And I saw at first hand their technical innovation in the groundbreaking “Jonmaster” cleaning system to tack MRSA superbug in hospitals”

Derby Evening Telegraph
Friday, July 01, 2005

“Alfreton cleaning product specialists, JohnsonDiversey, the company behind Brillo and Mr Muscle products, took category wins in the Manufacturing Excellence Awards. JohnsonDiversey won the Warwick Manufacturing Group Award for Resource Efficiency, and then went on to scope the overall winning title for “demonstrating world-class performance in all areas of its manufacturing operation”. “James McLean, spokesman for JohnsonDiversey, which employ 123 people at its Cotes Park Lane Factory, said: “We are, obviously, absolutely delighted”.

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Exert from the Professional Engineering Journal Volume 18 Number 13 (John Pullin)

Cleaning up at the MX awards

A little-known company that makes cleaning materials showed a clean pair of heels to the other competitors in the MX2005 Manufacturing Excellence Awards. John Pullin runs through the roll-call of winners. It was a good year for unsung heroes. The overall winner of the 2005 MX Manufacturing Excellence Awards is JohnsonDiversey. It is not a household name, but the three-year-old international company is the result of the coming together of two much better known firms, Johnson Wax and parts of Unilever.

Elsewhere in the roll-call of winners there was also a preponderance of smaller and less-known companies. MX will hopefully make some of them better known. In fact, among the product portfolio of the overall winner, JohnsonDiversey, there are some blue-chip clients ranging from supermarkets to the National Health Service. What MX has done over several years is to reveal JohnsonDiversey as a serially excellent manufacturer. Its triumph in this year’s awards came about as a result of its good showing in several of the award categories and it took two individual awards 0 for people effectiveness and resource efficiency. As the company had also won last year’s award for customer focus, this excellence is patently no flash in the pan. The basis for JohnsonDiversey’s success is the way it gets the most out of its people. “The people effectivenss award is the one we really wanted to win,” says Coes Park site manager James McLean. But what impressed the MX judges equally was the way that people policies linked in to other developments at the site. John Straw from the company’s fluid processing department told them how his work as a quality champion had translated into ta significant increase in “right first time” batching of the chemicals used to make cleaning products, up from 91% in the first half of 2004 to 95% in the first half of this year and anecdotatlly at 99% in the past month or so. The key, he said, was that “people had got tot ake responsibility for their own quality”. Process innovation, another category where the company was a strong contender, has required some investment, but much of it is down to the way people at Cotes Park take charge of their own work. The figures are good. JohnsonDiversey’s UK operations have vitually doubled their output in the past four years and inventory levels have been slashed to almost zero. “We’ve halved our production costs in four years,” says McLean and, far from following the trend towards outsourcing operations, the company is “in-sourcing”.

Resource efficiency
The Warwick Manufacturing Group Award for Resource Efficiency had four finalist contenders in MX2005: GKN wheels Telford, JohnsonDiversey; Westland Transmissions; and Magal Metallifacture, the Nottingham company that makes car jacks and other equipment for the automotive industry. The award went to JohnsonDiversey, the manufacturer of hygiene and cleaning products, for the way that it had squeezed a huge productivity increase out of its Derbyshire plant without making substantial capital investment.

People effectiveness
One of the points that makes the MX Awards different from other award schemes is that the judges are not constrained by precedent. In MX2004, one award that was withheld when it was felt no entry quite met the standard wanted. In MX2005 the most hotly contested category of all, the PE Award for People Effectiveness, left the judges unable to separate two outstanding companies. For the first time, three are joint winners. JohnsonDiversey, winner also of the Resource Efficiency Award, has handed over a huge amount of the responsibility for improving the performance of its Derbyshire site to its employees, all of whom have personal development plans, training schedules and involvement in all aspects of the business. Uniquely among the 17 companies invited to make presentations to the final judges, JohnsonDiversey entrusted the job to some of its shopfloor staff. Their own tales of their career developments made it clear that this was an outstanding company to work for.

The value behind the awards
The basis of entry to the MX Awards is a self-assessment audit, a questionnaire that enables every participant to benchmark performance on a range of factors that are central to manufacturing excellence and vital to competitiveness in tough global markets. The questionnaire has been devised by the manufacturing experts at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, and it’s intended to be searching. In many cases, the information required may not be readily to hand, or may require departments to collaborate. But it’s the rigour of the process that provides its true value. Past entrants to the Manufacturing Excellence Awards have commented that the audit has opened their eyes to the factors that make for manufacturing success and has made them question established practices across the organisation. For many companies, including some past overall winners of the competition, the audit is the prime reason for entering, providing a unique opportunity to assess their own performance against the best practice. Entrants complete as much, or as little, of the audit as they want. In many cases, they are seeking to benchmark a particular aspect of their work, rather than the whole. And, for each part of the questionnaire completed, at the end of the MX process the entrant will receive free of change a fully-detailed comparison of where they stand against the best, with practical suggestions for further development.

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Factory with troubled past cleans up the competition
By Peter Marsh

Published: June 30 2005 03:00 | Last updated: June 30 2005 03:00

A factory that narrowly escaped closure five years ago because it was missing most of its operating targets last night won a competition to find Britain's best manufacturing operation.

The plant - which makes industrial cleaning fluids and is run by JohnsonDiversey, a private US company - is in Alfreton, Derbyshire. Roughly a quarter of its 123 staff are former coal miners.

The factory has increased production threefold since 2000 with a slightly reduced workforce, while the number of different types of cleaning product that it makes has risen from 350 to 550. Over this period, the cost of producing one tonne of product, excluding the money spent on raw materials, has been cut from £130 to £80, according to Ian O'Connor, the plant's supply director.

" We've been able to encourage employees to think more about the manufacturing processes at the plant to improve them, without requiring the company to spend large amounts on capital investment,"
he said.

The awards recognise good performance by manufacturers that have struggled in the past few years in the face of increasing competition by low-cost countries and weak demand in many export countries. Over the past eight years, about 1m people have lost their jobs in manufacturing, and the sector has slipped to account for only about 16 per cent of economic output.

Government ministers have, however, done their best to stress the importance to the economy of a strong manufacturing sector, which is one reason why the Department of Trade and Industry has backed the awards in the hope that publicity given to good practices by some companies can be emulated by others.

The Alfreton plant is the only UK factory run by the company, which is one of the two biggest makers in the world in specialised cleaning materials used by industries such as food processing, breweries and health services. It makes 90,000 tonnes a year of cleaning materials, which are mainly sold to UK customers and are worth about £100m. The chemicals go under a number of names, including Mr Muscle and Brillo - brands used in consumer cleaning materials but which are also used in the industrial field.

Munish Bhalla, quality manager at the site, said in 2000 the factory was given what amounted to an ultimatum by its then owner, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch chemicals and consumer products group, to improve or face closure. Two years later the plant - opened in 1996 - became part of JohnsonDiversey after it bought Unilever's industrial cleaning fluid operations. "In the previous way the plant was run, the management style was to react to problems that occurred and then try to solve them," said Mr Bhalla. "The new approach is to involve the staff to encourage them to come up with ideas to improve processes and avoid the problems in the first place."

One example is an idea suggested by plant operators that special chemical monitoring devices should be fitted next to mixing vessels in the factory. That means operators can themselves determine the quality of specific cleaning fluids as they are being manufactured, saving time and money through not having to take a sample to a laboratory some distance away in the factory.

" This idea was a simple one but illustrates the way in which the plant as a whole has increased productivity and helped cut costs in what is a very competitive business," said Mr Bhalla.

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