A world-class producer of ready-to-heat ribs, pork, and chickens, this manufacturer ran 200-plus products at scale, yet its margins were leaking from every direction. Leadership needed to increase yield, improve flow, and reduce cost to hit its targets while optimizing a large temporary labor pool. After seeing sustainable savings from POWERS at a previous company, the COO engaged the firm to fix the operation rather than apply a one-time patch.

Underneath the volume, the operating discipline was thin. Managers and supervisors had neither the tools nor the training to run their areas profitably or make sound business decisions. Unbalanced production lines created overcrewing, made worse by regularly bringing in far more temporary workers than the day’s production required, with 20 to 30 unnecessary temps pulled in on a daily basis. Yield was tracked in only one area instead of across the whole process, and managers paid little attention to temperatures, waste, or giveaway, or to the impact each department had on the final number.

The dysfunction reached past the plant floor. Sales, Supply Chain Management, and Operations barely collaborated, and Sales, with no accountability for inventory, pushed for higher levels while inaccurate forecasts drove excess inventory and prebuilding across the plant. Siloed, disconnected, daily-only schedules disrupted flow and left managers reacting instead of planning. What leadership needed was not a single fix but a connected operating system: balanced standards, accurate crewing, linked schedules, visible yield, and managers trained to act on what the data was telling them.

POWERS connected cause and effect across management, systems and processes, people and behavior, equipment, and materials, then worked the four functional areas in parallel. The firm evaluated and revised standards for each product and built a crewing tool that specified the correct number of people per line by product code, so temps could be ordered against the day’s actual production requirements rather than a forecast. Aligning crews to the day’s needs eliminated bottlenecks and removed the 20 to 30 unnecessary temps that had been showing up daily, the primary source of the projected savings.

On flow and scheduling, POWERS developed a tool that streamlined and linked all schedules and required every order or schedule change to be submitted the day before, ending the siloed, daily-only planning that had disrupted the plant. Products were staged the day before for better startup scores. Across Seasoning and Ovens, the team set target temperatures through seasoning and cooking, minimized the product stacking that had been reducing weight, and optimized the underused vacuum tumblers. In the Cutting Room, balanced staffing on the new standards and the day-before cutoffs cleared the trimming backlogs and cut indirect labor hours.

To make the gains hold, POWERS made performance visible and taught managers to act on it. Yield tracking was implemented by stage so losses surfaced where they happened, Ready-to-Eat operators were trained to minimize rework, and operators were engaged by reporting hourly production percentages on the floor. Managers were coached daily to read their reports, use OEE information to pinpoint improvements, and manage temperatures, waste, and giveaway against real standards. POWERS defined roles and responsibilities to reduce overlap, documented procedures, and involved HR for qualified staffing, so the new discipline outlasted the engagement. Together these changes delivered $2.2 million in projected annual savings, a 1.5% yield gain, a 10% rise in OEE, and a 27% improvement in Ready-to-Eat rework efficiency.