FACILITIES MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPERS How a Candy Manufacturer Maintains its 1M Square Feet to Maximize Uptime and Increase Its Equipment Life Cycle Written by ARAMARK Facility Services The global headquarters of the New England Confectionery Company is a childhood dream. Spanning one million square feet, most of the building is dedicated to the production of scores of candies that are favorites of many Americans. So much space, and so many machines that must run at peak performance, bring with them several facility management considerations. Learn how NECCO continues to deliver for its customers by keeping its location clean, maximizing equipment uptime, increasing the life cycle of significant capital assets and developing new ways to enhance production efficiency. The New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) is a national icon. Entering its 160th year of continuous operation, it is the oldest multi-line candy company in the country. In 2003, NECCO consolidated their Massachusetts facilities into a single, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Revere, Mass, just outside of Boston. The new global headquarters of NECCO is a childhood dream. The building spans one million square feet, much of which is dedicated to the production of scores of candies that are favorites of many Americans – as well as the development of future favorites. On any given day, the production rooms are buzzing with the cooking, cooling and packaging of thousands of Clark® bars, peanut butter kisses, Mary Janes® and Haviland® thin mints – and millions of the company's flagship candies, the NECCO wafer®. So much space, and so many machines that must run at peak performance, bring with them several facility management considerations. From keeping the location clean, to maximizing uptime, to increasing the life cycle of significant capital assets and making suggestions for greater efficiency, ARAMARK works in tandem with NECCO to keep all systems go and all customers happy. Production at Its Peak At the heart of the headquarters building is NECCO's production floor. Here, NECCO's employees, numbering approximately 850 during peak seasons, make, combine and process just the right ingredients for the candies that will soon be on retailers' shelves across the country. Employees are dressed in hair nets, gloves and white scrubs, working with clinical precision to ensure the quality of the final product. At their side, approximately 50 ARAMARK employees closely monitor and maintain more than 200 machines on which candy production relies. These machines range in function, from mixing ingredients into a batter, to segmenting batter into individual pieces, to cooking and cooling the chocolate candies, to wrapping the candies and packaging them in bags for sale. Machine operations in a confectionary plant are critical in detail, requiring systems to operate with predictable efficiency. For example, thermostats in cooking or cooling systems that vary by just one or two degrees can cause chocolates to "bloom," which makes chocolate take on a white and chalky appearance that, while harmless, is unappealing to a consumer. "Our production floor is the nerve center of our business," says Bill Leva, Vice President of Operations at NECCO. "We rely on ARAMARK to ensure smooth operations and full functionality, which is essential to making our clients, and their customers, happy." ARAMARK technicians are stationed throughout the facility, checking efficiency and operation of each piece of equipment to ensure optimal performance, conducting preventive and corrective maintenance on production equipment, and maintaining all infrastructure equipment. They operate seamlessly with the organization, often using golf carts and bicycles to quickly travel to various parts of the production floor to respond to maintenance and repair requests. "It's an awesome challenge to maintain and continuously improve the performance of equipment ranging from state-of-the art robotic packaging equipment to century-old candy production machines", says ARAMARK Director Phil Littlefield. "Here at NECCO, we've assembled a best-in-class team with a tremendous amount of leadership and technical experience in the maintenance industry, and that team is what sets ARAMARK apart from the conventional approach to plant equipment maintenance. We execute a structured model for Maintenance Excellence, focused on the fundamentals of leadership and Total Productive Maintenance to help drive NECCO's Overall Equipment Effectiveness and their production capacity." This team also sanitizes these critical pieces of equipment, as well as the entire stadium-sized two-story facility, to ensure continued safety of employees and customers. Each machine is tagged with a unique identifier, and maintenance and repair activity is tracked through an electronic database, providing insight into the overall "health" of the system and helping to predict when periodic maintenance may be required. ARAMARK also operates a fully-equipped maintenance and machine shop on the premises, where technicians manufacture replacement parts for NECCO's machines, many of which date back to the early 1900's. This further enhances the life span of these critical systems, as well as ensures maximum uptime during peak production. Many of the ARAMARK technicians are specialists on certain machines. After working intensively with these systems for several years, they have an almost instinctive feel for how to get a machine to optimal performance. That experience, coupled with the Total Productive Maintenance tools being implemented by the Aramark Team, allows the Team to move from emergency "firefighting maintenance" to a proactive Predictive Maintenance program resulting in the reduction of unplanned operational downtime. At the same time, ARAMARK takes great care to cross-train its technicians on other machines, enhancing the skills of each employee and ensuring robust bench strength in production system repair and maintenance. "ARAMARK's most vital asset is our people, and it's critical that we have a well-trained workforce able to quickly and effectively respond to the myriad challenges that we can face on a daily basis," stated Littlefield. The Role of a Strategic Partner To ensure strong communications about current activities and future strategies, ARAMARK representatives meet with NECCO decision makers daily to provide status reports and exchange feedback on operations. ARAMARK also participates in weekly meetings with NECCO representatives to gain insight into key decisions that may require support from facilities management, reducing customer service issues for NECCO. For example, ARAMARK is able to learn from production planners when production cycles are expected to speed up or slow down, as well as when important deadlines need to be met. Insight into plans from production planners can inform when systems will require changes or tweaking - such as when and how phrases on NECCO's Sweethearts® Conversation Hearts, a frequent favorite of both adults and children nationwide during Valentine's Day, will be changing. ARAMARK teams also meet each afternoon to share ideas and identify challenges. This further ensures that operations run smoothly and that all technicians are aware of various factors that may impact operations on other parts of the floor. These meetings inform more than just plans for production system maintenance, repair and sanitization. They also provide valuable insight for other more general facilities maintenance concerns, which ARAMARK also manages for NECCO at this location. "We use various data collection methods to establish and monitor our Key Performance Indicators, or KPI," says ARAMARK Maintenance Manager Michael Guerriero. "We use those metrics to quantitatively evaluate our performance, identify opportunities for continuous improvement, and to measure our contributions to our customer's success. Those metrics are shared with our employees and with our customer; ownership of those metrics and results are important to ensure buy-in through both organizations." "Communication is a two-way street," says Leva. "ARAMARK has been invaluable to achieving our business goals, and together we have discovered new ways to ensure key expectations are understood and met throughout the facility as part of our continuous improvement framework." About ARAMARK ARAMARK is a leader in professional services, providing award-winning food services, facilities management, and uniform and career apparel to health care institutions, universities and school districts, stadiums and arenas, and businesses around the world. In FORTUNE magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies," ARAMARK has consistently ranked as one of the top three most admired companies in its industry as evaluated by peers and industry analysts since 1998. The company was also ranked first in its industry in the 2006 FORTUNE 500 survey. Headquartered in Philadelphia, ARAMARK has approximately 240,000 employees serving clients in 18 countries. Learn more at the company's Web site, www.aramark.com.