Community Chef Cuts Lead Times And Improves Customer Satisfaction With Oliver Wight

Melbourne, Australia, September 2, 2014 (Newswire.com) - With the help of Integrated Business Planning (advanced S&OP) and business improvement specialists, Oliver Wight, Melbourne-based meals-on-wheels provider, Community Chef, has reduced lead times by 20 per cent, refined its manufacturing model and improved its value proposition.

Born out of a market failure to provide for the nutritional wellbeing of the elderly and disabled in Melbourne, Community Chef provides high quality food for vulnerable local residents. Within three years Community Chef evolved from concept to state-of-the-art $24M facility, providing more than 1.2 million meals a year to its 21 local government shareholders, hospitals and residential care homes.

"We found the changes we implemented for the hospitals was actually a better way of doing things all round. Now when one market drives best practice, we can adapt it to suit the other markets we are serving."

Joe Ciccarone, Community Chef CEO

With support from Oliver Wight to develop more robust planning processes, it has reduced the long lead times that were negatively impacting customer relationships and hampering growth ambitions. The benefits have been substantial: “Straight away we cut lead-times by two days, which was a real benefit for our council customers,” explains Community Chef CEO, Joe Ciccarone.

Having refined its product portfolio and improved its scheduling structure, Community Chef is now confidently expanding into the hospital food sector – a significant growth opportunity. This is driving benefits for its council clients too:

“We found the changes we implemented for the hospitals was actually a better way of doing things all round. Now when one market drives best practice, we can adapt it to suit the other markets we are serving,” says Ciccarone.

And it’s not just processes which have been improved, says Operations Manager, Mei Ling Wong,“It’s really improved the skills and knowledge of staff; everyone can see what it takes to improve the systems in place.”

Building on the initial success, Community Chef is now working on embedding its new processes across the company: “We’ve made great strides already and now we’re taking our initial steps on the path to implementing a more robust Sales & Operations Planning process; we can see the enormous benefits it will bring to our business,” says Ciccarone.