Fox’s: Delivering Over 6 Billion Biscuits Every Year

sofco’s Scheduling solution supports Fox’s Biscuits to bake over 6 billion biscuits year on year.

Fox’s Biscuits, part of Ferrero, are a UK leading biscuit manufacturer and have been producing quality biscuits since 1853 from their manufacturing sites in Batley, Kirkham and Uttoxeter. Known for producing some of the nation’s favourite biscuits, Fox’s has grown from a family baker to a household name, baking over 6 billion biscuits every year which are sent all over the world.

Why sofco?

Fox’s has been working with members of the sofco team for over fifteen years and as a result our partnership and businesses have grown together. They value loyalty and factored it into their original selection of sofco as their solution provider. We are proud that they have continued to select sofco over the years as with Fox’s strong stable product base, they continue to find the sofco Scheduling solution easy to adopt and use.

The Challenge

The scope of the project was to replace spreadsheets which were not coping. Often, Excel spreadsheets designed to support a company’s supply chain are complicated or owned by one user thus making them hard to use and collaborate on.

Fox’s also needed a solution that would help them reduce production & maintenance downtime and reduce costs as well as providing them with Production Line Scheduling and WIP Management.

The Solution

Working closely with Fox’s, sofco were able to configure a solution based upon optimal finite production and labour scheduling on a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis. The solution had to be based on real business constraints, such as production & labour capacity, material availability, and storage.

The implementation of multi-stage production scheduling has given Fox’s visibility and control of their entire production process and as a result, they are now able to manage variable labour shift patterns, manage their production and setting labour differently, manage their auxiliary resources such as tooling, pack heads etc. and implement Management by Exceptions driven by dashboards and traffic light warnings.

In addition, sofco’s Scheduling solution has provided Fox’s with full simulation capabilities, accurate and optimal scheduling of the plant in line with their requirements, labour planning synchronised with production and pre-defined shift patterns with all constraints managed.

The result? A reduced cost of customer service in both time and resource, optimal use of production equipment and labour, a rapid scheduling cycle, reduced material waste and significantly improved labour costs, Business Reporting, and Allergen Reporting.