Kinnerton Confectionery transforms it’s product creation process with AESSiS

When it needed to optimise its new product development process, Kinnerton turned to AESSiS to help it develop and implement its new strategy.

Kinnerton is the UK’s largest independent manufacturer of chocolate and novelty confectionery. It has around 800 employees across three manufacturing sites in the UK and it prides itself on its flexibility and ability to quickly innovate.

It makes chocolate bars, lollies, advent calendars, biscuits, Easter eggs... to name but a few of its products and it produces private label and bespoke confectionery for some of the UK’s largest retailers including some very well known UK brands.

Kinnerton made over 10 million Advents last year and over 20 million Easter Eggs this year. It has used over 200 licensed characters over the last 30 years and it develops over 400 new products a year. Around 50% of Kinnerton’s product line is seasonal. That means producing Easter eggs for Easter and advent calendars for Christmas. You can’t be late for obvious reasons. So Kinnerton’s sales and profitability rely heavily on the company’s ability to get new products to market very quickly and efficiently.

The PLM Challenge At Kinnerton

Following waves of growth and expansion, the company was starting to become a victim of its own success. With an ever-expanding product portfolio, Kinnerton’s process for new product development and introduction (NPDI) had grown overly complex and unpredictable.

Employees from various different departments lacked visibility into the overall process and struggled to manage the huge volumes of documents associated with such a wide range of products. This tended to extend the early phase of production and forced product teams to continuously make up for lost time by compressing the later stages of the NPDI process.

The situation was becoming untenable and began to create some big financial risks. “We need to deliver seasonal products on time at the beginning of each season,” said Matthew Davies, Head of IT for Kinnerton. “If we miss a date, millions of pieces go unsold.”

So Kinnerton needed to find a way to get its product information and NPDI process under better control. This would enable it to get new products into production faster and get more products developed in the same amount of time. It would also help cut out the ‘fire fighting’ late in the process. Thus, combining mass production with high rates of innovation would then give them an edge over the competition and ultimately of course help the company make more money.

Looking For a Solution

Kinnerton decided they needed a solution that would provide a single source of product information across the entire company.

  • It had to be open and easy to integrate with other business systems.

  • It had to be scaleable across a growing user base and provide ‘virtually unlimited capacity’ for storing all kinds of data and information associated with each product

  • It had to be web-based to reduce IT overhead

  • It had to provide sophisticated control over product versions and links or relationships between different pieces of information.

  • It had to provide the ability to build complex workflow and approval processes

But very importantly it had to provide the capability to build the data model that Kinnerton actually needed. A ‘one size fits all’ data model just wouldn’t cut it. They wanted to differentiate their processes. Perhaps most importantly of all, they needed a solution that they could change, adapt and extend.

Why Aras?

After evaluating several systems, Davies and his team chose Aras Innovator for its flexibility, ease of deployment and because of Aras Innovator’s open, web-based platform, Kinnerton could continuously incorporate new processes and capabilities over time. Davies again, “This all adds up to innovation at the lowest possible cost.

Why AESSIS?

“We were impressed by AESSiS’s ability to provide open, honest and objective input. They really understood the PLM in general and Aras solution in particular and were also able to deliver a very flexible & proactive approach, and at a very competitive price.We were able to form an effective team really quickly. We were able to bring our detailed knowledge about our process and our vision to the table and AESSiS were able to marry this very effectively with the capabilities of the Aras technology”.

Building The Solution

The PLM initiative began with workshops to establish consensus and a clear vision of how Kinnerton’s future processes should work in the context of Aras.

AESSiS and Kinnerton then worked together to map the company’s requirements onto the Aras technology. The great thing about Aras says Davies “is that you can build exactly the data model and process you want in Aras. You don’t have to compromise. But you also want to take advantage of standard Aras tools and features where it makes sense.“

Building the Kinnerton Data Model in Aras

The Aras deployment began with a pilot focused on the basic product development process. A bespoke data model was created to capture and manage Kinnerton’s new products. These products were organised into ranges and the ranges collected by season. This aligned very well with Kinnerton’s seasonal approach.

Users were allowed to interact with the pilot system and enter those products that were under consideration for future development, organising them into seasons and building their product hierarchies.

Feedback was gathered on a regular basis and the data model began to evolve to match the needs of the user community. This somewhat ‘Darwinian’ approach of continuous adaptation to the environment is quite a unique approach and what happened was quite interesting. What had been intended to be purely a pilot environment began to be used in earnest. In a sense the user experience was leading the evolution of the data model to the point where the technology gradually slipped into production.

Building The Stage Gate Process

The next step for Kinnerton was building the electronic workflows that would underpin the product development process. Prior to this, the company had remarkably few formal processes and information flows varied greatly depending on who was involved with a particular product. “Frankly product versioning and workflow tracking had been out of control,” said Davies. “Aras became the driver of process standardisation in the business, it made us build consensus around consistent workflows and document management practices.

It wasn’t always easy to achieve that consensus but the process we ended up with was far superior to our previous ad hoc system of managing information via Excel and emails. Now, instead of information being spread across hundreds of spreadsheets and Word documents, we all have access to one accurate and consistent set of Product information within Aras and we know exactly where each piece of information fits into the product lifecycle. We can quickly identify where we need the contributions of particular individuals to keep projects and products on track, we also have full transparency into where the product is in the overall workflow and we have complete visibility and traceability into the decision making process.

Looking To The Future

Today, more than 1,200 Kinnerton products across 36 ranges are managed in Aras. But there is plenty of scope to automate and improve more business processes. In 2014, Kinnerton began to use Aras in its quality department to track material failures in deliveries from suppliers. The ability to closely monitor materials failures, react appropriately and transfer accurate costs back to the supplier has tremendous benefits to the Kinnerton business.

Changing The Culture

An interesting aspect of the implementation at Kinnerton is the impact it has on organisational culture. “Seeing the full picture changes people’s view of their own role,” said Davies. “They now see the strategic value of their contributions, which makes everyone push harder to bring ‘his or her’ product to market on time.” “It’s a remarkable transformation and a quantum leap forward for us in terms of accountability and knowledge sharing. We’re all on the same page and know what must be done at all times” said Davies

Conclusions

Ultimately, the continued success of the implementation at Kinnerton will be measured by its continued ability to deliver further improvements in the way Kinnerton brings new innovative products to market and keep it ahead of the competition. But certainly Matthew Davies could not be happier with the success Kinnerton has had with the technology, it has changed our way of thinking.

When we talk about the implementation we’re talking about how everything connects─ roles, functions, departments, and the entire process. Not only does it change our view from a project level to a process level, it changes the meaning of innovation for everyone.

The key to its success so far has been a great team effort between Kinnerton & AESSiS teams combined with a great piece of technology.

And with this team in place, we will continue to deliver the value that the Kinnerton business needs long into the future.