Case Study: Charlie Bigham’s Boosts Efficiency with Netcall

Charlie Bigham’s is a British brand of ready meals founded by Charlie Bigham.

The Challenge

A campervan road trip from the UK to India in the 1990s inspired founder Charlie Bigham to create delicious, high-quality pre-prepared meals. Since then, his small business has expanded massively and now Charlie Bigham’s is one of the UK’s most successful independent food brands.

Today, the B Corp-verified business has over 800 staff and two kitchen locations. These provide leading supermarkets across the UK with more than 50 dishes. By the end of 2024, sales were up 12.7% to £184.5m.

But profitable, sustainable growth hasn’t come about by chance. To expand and evolve, while maximizing efficiency, Charlie Bigham’s needed a process mapping and improvement solution.

The Solution

Charlie Bigham’s found the answer with Liberty Spark, our process improvement solution. Managers have been able to document, centralize and connect processes – bringing them to life.

This improved engagement and ownership across teams, while supporting a culture of continuous improvement. And each time the business faced a strategic crossroads, Liberty Spark has enabled managers to find the best outcome.

Charlie Bigham’s is a finely tuned business. Dishes have a fixed shelf life, leaving very little margin for error. As the business grew, it was essential that every process was documented via Liberty Spark, from the arrival of raw ingredients through to kitchen production, storage, picking, dispatch and invoicing.

Rather than information being held solely by subject-matter experts, each department needed visibility of the end-to-end process. It opened up a level playing field.

Today, Liberty Spark’s central, updateable maps spell out clearly to everyone how the business runs – from the top level down into the detail.

This has proved essential for onboarding new joiners, identifying areas for improvement and providing the basis for strategic conversations about change.

Teams now have the insight and confidence to talk about a business they fully understand – and where everyone is on the same page.

Liberty Spark is powering digital transformation. Mapping out processes has helped to identify every human touchpoint and where data is gathered. A wealth of opportunities for improvement came to light quickly.

For example, Spark made it clear that the weighing process for ingredients on the assembly line was inefficient. Now, smarter ways of working have been adopted – so ingredients only need weighing once, rather than multiple times.

Also, Spark helped them to identify that many processes across the operation involved manual paperwork. Now, staff use tablets to record and track events in real time. This has also saved 35 hours each week of staff time on inputting paper records onto the system, equating to 262 working days each year.

Whenever improvements are suggested, it’s easier for managers to articulate the benefits clearly using Liberty Spark. And this makes it simpler to get buy-in and sign-off from stakeholders.

Charlie Bigham’s delivered vast continuous improvement savings in 2024. Liberty Spark contributed to uncovering these opportunities.

The next big efficiency gain will be a warehouse management system (WMS) that’s expected to make further significant savings for the business.

Paper processes will be digitized, goods will be scanned in and out, and the dispatch team can minimize the cost to the business of missed or incorrect orders.

Spark has been key in helping Charlie Bigham’s to document all the processes involved – to ensure these are reflected and improved upon by the WMS.

Behind the scenes, Liberty Spark enabled managers to capture processes and then deliver transformational changes which bring strategic benefits to the business. These include:

• Protecting the company: The IT team enhanced systems and processes to strengthen the company’s security posture, enabling it to become Cyber Essentials Plus certified.
• Upgrading the ERP system: Spark helped managers to overcome the complexity of moving from an on-premise ERP system to SYSPRO 8 running on Microsoft Azure.
• Integrating core applications: Process mapping proved invaluable as the company centralized and integrated its recipe solutions software as well as EDI ordering from supermarkets.
• Investing in growth: A large site extension will provide the space to grow as demand increases, and Spark has helped to provide clarity in decision making.

The Results

“Liberty Spark makes it easy to map processes quickly, navigate your way around the organization and explain changes – and how they’ll affect the business. It’s an essential tool for keeping everyone engaged and collaborating,” said Sarah Elliot, Change Manager at Charlie Bigham’s.

Scalability at Speed

By understanding exactly how its processes operate, Charlie Bigham’s has been able to ramp up production and achieve record sales without costs snowballing

Opportunities to Innovate

Liberty Spark has shone a light on slow, manual and error-prone processes. Changes have led to vast savings already, with more to come

Closer Collaboration

17 team members are Liberty Spark gurus, from kitchen operations, finance, commercial, project management and change management, sharing overviews and insights easily with colleagues and stakeholders

Strategic Direction

Charlie Bigham’s knows where it’s headed – and why. The company vision and direction is understood across the business, so major decisions reflect the reality of the day-to-day business and factor in the impact and benefits across the organization.

With Liberty Spark, Charlie Bigham’s can see where its master data is created, stored and moved around its business.

In the next chapter of its story, the company is aiming to adopt a data analytics platform. Spark will provide the management team with the tools they need to connect all master data from across the business – and take digital transformation to the next level.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall – View the Original Article

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Author: Netcall
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson