Customer Story: Orkla Foods

Millions of people depend on Orkla Foods to supply a diverse range of high quality food and beverage products. Their portfolio includes everything from jams and chocolate, to pizza and ready-to-eat meals. Orkla is proud to deliver delicious products while maintaining a focus on quality, innovation, and sustainable growth in their day-to-day manufacturing processes.

Orkla is committed to finding new tools and solutions to increase productivity and sustainable ways of working throughout their manufacturing operations. The initial pilot project with Orkla was started by jointly identifying a use case at a single site with the goal of creating a positive impact on their manufacturing operations. Today, SwipeGuide is live at 7 sites within Orkla Foods' global network.

We’re proud to announce that the SwipeGuide platform has made a positive and scalable impact on: 

• Instruction authoring time
• Machine downtime
• Costly human errors
• Training and knowledge management

Our collaboration has allowed Orkla Foods to optimize the delivery of digital work instructions at crucial moments during the manufacturing process. We’ve also helped reduce the workload placed on supervisors to create, edit, and distribute work instructions and Standard Operating Procedures [SOPs].

Intuitive digital tools like SwipeGuide are one of the most effective ways to address the manufacturing skills gap. Orkla Foods is enjoying the added benefits of streamlining their training process while capturing and correcting silent knowledge.

Put these benefits together, and it’s clear that SwipeGuide is helping to continuously improve processes while maintaining strict standards of efficiency and product quality.

Tablet editing is a key feature for Orkla Foods

In practice.

One site in Norway uses SwipeGuide to help produce a wide variety of products in a broad range of categories - from Pizza toppings, sausages, and hamburgers, to vegan meat substitutes and halal meat products. This location also serves as a distribution hub for products from outside of Norway and is a crucial logistics center for their European operations.

Between 180 and 200 full-time and seasonal employees use SwipeGuide to perform their daily work, and their supervisors enjoy the streamlined content creation process. They promote engagement with our platform with a top-down strategy: leaders and supervisors model content creation and usage best practices to inspire the rest of the workforce and drive adoption.

In our pilot project, the SwipeGuide platform has demonstrated the benefits of replacing a paper-based work instruction system. Like many modern manufacturers, Orkla's factories have relied heavily on paper Standard Operating Procedures [SOPs] and work instructions to support operators in their daily work. Before, if an individual operator needed information on how to safely and correctly accomplish a task within a particular workflow or process, she would need to physically locate this information where it was stored.

Has my supervisor made changes to this process? 

Is this information correct, up-to-date, and will it help me finish the job the right way? 

Sound familiar?

Orkla Foods has used our digital work instruction platform to streamline the authoring, editing, and distribution process of instructions and SOPs on the shop floor.

In practice.

SwipeGuide helps make pizza! Another Orkla site uses our platform to manufacture more than 25 varieties of pizza. SwipeGuide digital standard work allows around 150 full-time employees to perform everything from routine operations to complex maintenance tasks. Each of these has a SwipeGuide work instruction attached to reduce errors and keep machinery running at peak efficiency.

This site also takes full advantage of the crowdsourcing capabilities of our platform. From the time that SwipeGuide is used to onboard new employees, supervisors make sure to collect and implement feedback directly from teams on the factory floor.

The top companies are searching for new tools and strategies to deal with the growing manufacturing skills gap. Just like other food and beverage companies, Orkla Foods sees employees retiring (or job hopping) and a new generation of millennial employees taking their place. Our collaboration provided the opportunity to refine the way that they approached the training of this new workforce while simultaneously optimizing existing knowledge.

More efficient training.

Orkla Foods saw the chance to gain an edge in Industry 4.0 and improve upon a training method that has been an industry standard since lean strategies were pioneered in the 1960s. Like most manufacturing companies, they would pair new recruits with an experienced member of the workforce who would facilitate this “buddy system” for a number of weeks. When the recruit had questions or needed support on a particular machine, procedure, or task, this “training buddy” would step in to provide guidance and advice.

Digital work instructions and SOPs save time and resources by reducing the need for this in-person support. Rather, they provide the same resources in a mobile and digital format. New employees can go about their work on the shop floor and in the moment they need guidance or clarification on a particular process, they can scan a QR code and be given the most up-to-date work instruction for the task at hand.

This method: 

• Promotes a step-by-step learning opportunity that empowers learning-while-doing, a training philosophy that greatly enhances knowledge retention and also improves first-time-right scores.

• Ensures that all instructions delivered to new workers are the most up-to-date version of a procedure. This helps reduce errors on the shop floor.

• Saves time for senior members of the workforce. Relieved of their training responsibilities, the would-be partners now have more time to spend performing their regular set of responsibilities on the production line.

• Millennial employees raised on technology find the software to be intuitive and easy to use, while older members of the workforce enjoy and understand its simplicity.

• Reduces the amount of silent knowledge passed on to new recruits. Often, more senior employees will share the methods that have worked for them in the past instead of those defined by standard procedure. Often, these methods are successful - but sometimes they’re not.

We set out to help Orkla Foods create a more cost effective, sustainable way of working by delivering a flexible digital work instruction platform. 

Increased productivity.

Potentially the biggest impact - SwipeGuide simply makes daily life on the shop floor easier for both machine operators and their supervisors. They enjoy a simple, streamlined way of working that’s supported by an intuitive digital tool.

• Efficiency and Time-Saving for Authors and Editors. After SwipeGuide, The process of authoring and distributing paper work instructions has been simplified for those in charge of creating them. Instructions can be authored more quickly thanks to an intuitive interface, mockup tools, and the ability to capture and include photos within the editor.

• Supervisors no longer need to manage, edit, and distribute hundreds (potentially thousands) of paper work instructions. Orkla Foods reports that this has saved an incredible amount of time and effort for their staff.

• Up-to-Date and accessible instructions for Operators. Workers on the shop floor know that the work instructions they access are going to help them perform their job to standard - and that they’re never further away than their mobile device.

More sustainable work instructions and processes.

In line with Orkla Foods' CSR and sustainability goals - digital work instructions simply reduce the amount of paper used throughout a company’s entire supply chain. No more printing out lengthy PDF manuals or dealing with physical training materials. 

In addition to this, the productivity and efficiency benefits of the SwipeGuide platform mean fewer errors during production. This translates to less wasted resources and defects in the end product.

Reduced downtime and errors.

A digital platform makes it easy for manufacturers to standardize all processes and procedures within a production environment. For Orkla Foods, this has reduced expensive machine downtime and human errors during the production process. 

Improved First Time Right.

When employees have instant access to the most up-to-date work instructions, they are more likely to execute work correctly the first time they attempt a new or complex procedure. Implementing the SwipeGuide platform has resulted in a better FTR score for Orkla Foods.

Improved employee satisfaction.

Our partners at Orkla Foods are happy to say that they’ve noticed an overall improvement in the attitudes of their workforce on the factory floor. Machine operators are relieved to have a solution that requires less time to access and is guaranteed to be accurate and up-to-date.

In practice.

SwipeGuide helps busy manufacturing sites succeed by making crucial information available to everyone who needs it. One particular Orkla site produces a wide variety of dry goods, including sauces, stews, soups, pasta dishes, and more. This creates a lot of different tasks and changeovers, but also a high margin for error during daily operations.

By implementing digital standard work with SwipeGuide, they can assure that the processes and procedures associated with a diverse production environment are always up to date and distributed. This means that their more than 350 employees have access to the knowledge they need to get the job done right the first time.

Our collaboration began with a successful proof of value at a single factory within Orkla Foods Norway. This Proof of Value was initiated with a kickoff event in collaboration with key OFN stakeholders and SwipeGuide’s own customer success team, where we familiarized ourselves with the production facilities and continued to learn about their specific needs and use cases with the platform. 

Throughout this pilot program, Orkla Foods Norway enjoyed continuous support and rapid response from the SwipeGuide team. One of the distinct advantages of partnering with an agile startup is that any potential bugs and issues are typically addressed within 24 hours. This Proof of Value was supported by weekly meetings with SwipeGude customer success staff, where the teams could evaluate content creation and collaborate to implement the most effective ways of working with SwipeGuide.

This is something that we consider essential to the process - a work instruction platform is only as good as the instructions created. At SwipeGuide, we work closely with our customers to help them to not only become proficient with the tool, but also understand the research-based principles behind how to design truly effective work instructions within our minimalist platform. This allows customers like Orkla Foods to continuously and sustainably create efficient instructions according to standards for the long-term.

We've mutually evaluated the pilot program as a success, and Orkla Foods Norway was more than satisfied with theSwipeGuide platform. They cited the ROIs included above, but also a better way of working with happy employees who recognize the clear benefits over paper-based solutions. The time and energy saved with our platform simply made a positive impact on the quality and experience of their work.

Since then SwipeGuide has expanded to 7 sites across 3 countries - Norway, Latvia, and Finland. As our partnership moves forward, we’re excited to expand the SwipeGuide solution to even more factories within Orkla’s global value chain. Multiple locations utilizing our platforms - combined with innovative features like Cross-Platform and Multi-Space - will allow them to share and standardize best practices throughout their global network. This process helps companies like Orkla Foods innovate rapidly and capture operational knowledge more effectively.

Orkla Foods was eager to explore a partnership with SwipeGuide because they see the value of innovative digital solutions in Industry 4.0. Our collaboration has helped X locations improve efficiency and downtime on the factory floor, and has provided new opportunities for continuous improvement through the democratization of operational knowledge.

This means that their factories perform better and produce better products with fewer errors and less waste. Moving forward, our partnership will allow them to continue to meet their ambitious social and environmental sustainability goals while still providing the high quality products that have earned them their reputation in the global food manufacturing industry.

This customer story is just one of many. Our successful use case with Orkla Foods has demonstrated the impact that our solution can have on their global operations, but also the impact that digital work instructions can have in any manufacturing operation.