FOOD FACTORY DESIGN

Your procurement strategy outlines the suppliers, materials and services involved in the completion of your project and sets out how best to acquire them. It’s important to develop a clear and timely procurement plan to ensure that core business objectives and project delivery are met.

The choice of a particular procurement strategy largely depends on a client’s balance of cost, quality and time risks. By combining our clients’ requirements with our own knowledge and experience of similar projects, we identify the best way of achieving project completion with an optimum balance of risk, control and funding.

Our independence is our key asset when it comes to creating your procurement strategy. We’re not aligned to any design-build, contractors or sub-contractors. The route we advise and our reasons for recommending it are based solely on our experience and what we regard as the best strategy for our clients and their budget. We’re never driven by selling someone else’s services.

During the evaluation phase, a model will have been created for your project to present an overview of how the current and future state of your operations will look and operate in relation to your new project goals.

In the design phase, we take this initial model and refine it in order to achieve those goals. Adding precise detail, we plot the minutiae of every element, stage and step to create a meticulous confirmation of the original model. The resulting detailed model will consider future demand, process improvements and constraints, and will also identify areas of improvement, define business objectives and scope out the change.

The detailed model is a comprehensive map that allows us to gain insight into which scenarios would best suit the client products, processes and demand in order to reach the proposed project goals.

Whether it is designing new facilities from scratch or modifying or expanding existing facilities, it is essential for us and our clients to understand what the requirements of the new product are. The necessary process requirements and the intended production quantities must be made clear so that the appropriate processes can be designed and suitable equipment can be selected.

When it comes to choosing equipment, our approach is justified by scientific evaluation. Our completely independent advice isn’t influenced by ties with any equipment supplier. It is always focused on recommending the best option for your operation based on your process requirements, your desired quantities and your budget.

With the concept for the facility already established, this is the moment when we develop in more detail the functional requirements for each room and every area to ensure that all necessary safety precautions are in place.

To do this, we ask exacting questions about the detail. We walk our clients through the floor plans, asking what is needed, what is necessary and what is wanted in each and every space. This process has three crucial goals.

It firstly seeks to maximise the effectiveness of production processes to ensure a smooth flow of work, material and information throughout the system. It secondly ensures that the needs of people are integrated with the machinery and materials in such a way that it creates a single, well-functioning system. This will involve consideration of transport links, communications and the layout of machinery. Finally, it makes sure that the factory conforms to retailer standards. These are crucial requirement for suppliers of supermarkets to guarantee quality, safety and operational criteria for manufacturers and supermarkets and to provide protection for the end consumer.

Your feasibility study will have made a broad prediction with regard to location. In the Design phase, however, we move on to finding the exact site. To do this, we measure the needs of the new project against the merits – and possible pitfalls – of potential locations.

To determine the suitability of a site, we analyse locations on micro and macro levels with regard to numerous factors. We consider all elements such as the challenges of planning permission, size, the structural soundness of the land, the realities of vehicle movement, noise restrictions, wildlife restrictions, regional infrastructure capacity, the proximity to suppliers and customers, business costs, the costs of construction, the potential for expansion and human capital.

We go into intense detail to ensure that the potential site is right for you and your business. We conduct the surveys, evaluate purchasing decisions and conduct negotiations with landowners as part of our totally managed process.

Tendering is an intensive process that can be hugely advantageous to your project. If your tendering process is handled by experts, significant amounts of money can be saved, contractors and builders can be secured very prescriptively, and most importantly, you and the contractors can make decisions concerning the project.

When we manage your tendering process we can secure the skills needed to build your project in the most cost-effective and exacting way. We regularly work with the top food industry contractors in the UK and understand the details behind quotes. When tendering, we take into account the contractors’ recent work, the people they have working for them and their attitude towards your project.

By securing contractors on a highly prescriptive basis, we can eliminate the dangerous possibility of budget escalation, something that can easily occur when cheaper quotes that don’t fully account for the complex nature of the job are accepted over seemingly more expensive ones that come from contractors with a proven track record of similar food industry projects.