A global leader in rigid food packaging, Faerch has 50 years’ experience in developing, designing and producing innovative, high-quality packaging for ready meals, fresh meat, and food-to-go. With sustainability a key priority, they lead in offering a fully recyclable food packaging solution for their customers.
Faerch employs over 1300 employees across 12 manufacturing sites in Denmark, UK, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic and Spain as well as multiple sales offices across Europe. They are very innovative in their approach to technology-driven solutions to support their business growth, from shop-floor automation to digitised internal processes to help streamline resource and drive cost efficiencies where possible.
Manufacturing sites run 24/7 with employees and contractors working across a four-shift pattern. Working within an extremely busy manufacturing environment, Faerch need to account for a full spectrum of health and safety risks, from day-to-day issues such as manual handling and slips, trips and falls, to the more specialist and technical areas such as legionella risks.
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With health, safety and quality at the top of their agenda, Faerch is fully committed to ensuring the safety of its workforce, contractors, visitors, suppliers and customers. This is reflected not only in their policies and behaviours but ultimately in the way they do business from board level, down to the shop floor.
The Group adopts both a national and regional strategic approach to health and safety which helps to drive continuous improvement across all teams. Whilst, the health and safety team help ensure high standards are maintained across all operations, from on-boarding training, right down to health and safety stipulations on new equipment purchases.
Prior to implementing Assure, Faerch’s administration of health, safety and quality processes was similar to many companies within the sector, in that they used a traditional paper-based system. This involved the team spending a considerable amount of their time undertaking admin and manual reporting tasks.
Due to continued business growth, Faerch realised that they had outgrown the ‘traditional packaging’ of paper-based health and safety management and needed to move to a more efficient and accessible management system.
Faerch sought a technology solution that would bring everything together in one place. In essence, a ‘one-stop’ shop for their health, safety and quality management.
They required one central accessible system which would improve resource efficiencies and help drive cost savings. This included improving claims defensibility, reducing equipment damage and associated investigation and repair ‘down-time’.
Across operations, they wanted to improve visibility, deepen engagement and better support a proactive culture where each employee has a safety voice. Faerch wanted to make it simpler for its workforce to engage with health, safety and quality to improve the speed at which reported events are acted upon.
Therefore, the ability to harness everyday mobile technology to help refocus and promote positive internal behaviours was key. After all, health and safety doesn’t happen behind a desk, especially in manufacturing!
Faerch brought in Assure from SHE Software with a very clear vision in mind - to put health, safety and quality into the hands of its employees by making it simple straightforward and accessible - so it is simply viewed as ‘the way things are done’.
SHE Software implemented its highly configurable health and safety software solution, Assure, to provide Faerch with a flexible, efficient and accessible solution to manage health, safety and quality.
Assure was configured to meet local needs whilst fitting with wider organisational processes, workflows and corporate language. This included the inclusion of the Faerch logo, creation of a bespoke inspection checklist and management of user-access permissions.
Embedding a mobile-first approach, Assure has eliminated the need for duplication of entry. Employees can easily capture and record information in real-time in one central place, as well as completing ‘paperless’ audits, inspections and assessments, 24/7. This has enabled Faerch to identify, reduce and prevent hazards quicker and on a wider scale.
Existing processes are now integrated, and central teams have 360-degree visibility of health, safety and quality performance. Actions can be delegated locally and tracked through to completion.
As a result, Faerch have improved their claim defensibility and reduced number of pay-outs and the
resource and ‘down-time’ spent on related investigations.
Assure is helping Faerch improve engagement and participation across its workforce by making health and safety accessible to everyone. The executive team, right down to the individuals on the shop floor, can access and report information via a desktop, laptop or mobile device.
Accessibility and transparency is key. By providing an easy, straightforward way to capture health and safety data, Faerch is encouraging employees to view health and safety as part of their daily role. This has sparked a significant improvement in the quality and volume of data now captured across the business.
Using the Insights+ Business Intelligence functionality, Faerch can drill down into the data collected, identify trends and track leading indicators, to generate actionable insights. These insights are being used to communicate ‘lessons learned’ and to also share best practice across the workforce, helping
further promote a two-way dialogue with all staff.
Communication, awareness and engagement across the workforce has improved with health, safety and quality information regularly shared internally, via noticeboards, staff e-bulletins and internal communications.
By moving to a technology-based solution, Faerch has saved the equivalent of 39 days per month by eliminating manual processes and admin. This time is now spent proactively managing health and safety and focusing more attention on leading indicators to drive positive improvements.
Learn more about our health and safety software solution Assure.
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