Kirkpatrick came to work for Olson after serving as a consultant to the company. He has 26 years of experience in the baking industry. Kirkpatrick and Bill Miller, production manager, who had 21 years of experience with Olson Foods, form the day-to-day management team.
As with any work in progress, change is the dominant characteristic. “I looked for routine at Olson but never found it," Miller quips.
One significant change has been a major increase in production efficiency that led to a reduction in the work force. "We've dropped about 100 positions just within the last 18 months," Kirkpatrick says. The rationale behind this change has been the addition and upgrading of automated equipment, and employees developing their skills working specific production lines.
Within the last three years, the bakery has installed a new tunnel oven, added an automatic batter depositing system and a new Danish line, upgraded its donut line, and installed a conveying line to its packaging operations. "And we installed this equipment without any interruption of daily service," Miller says.
To deliver baked goods daily to 140 in-store bakeries, Gai's central distribution facility in Seattle, and six wholesale distributors, Kirkpatrick and Miller have looked to suppliers to help address their problems. "We've changed our attitude toward vendors," says Kirkpatrick. "We want vendors who can understand what we want to accomplish to visit us and help us do our jobs." He adds "Vendors are our partners in reaching our goal."
Olson Baking has received supplier help in many ways. For example, Olson Baking asked its mix suppliers for an extended shelf life raised donut. After numerous tests, Olson Baking determined that a special base and flour were needed to get the desired results. One of the bakery's mix suppliers provided such a combination. "We had to pay a little more for the product, but the results were well worth it," Kirkpatrick says.
Perhaps the biggest transition at Olson's Baking was switching from manual to automated production. It installed a 104-ft. tunnel oven for muffins and cookies in 1998, and the manufacturer trained employees on how to optimize the oven for greater production efficiency, as well as how to set oven time and temperature. "Our baking is much more uniform with the tunnel oven," Miller notes.
To complement the oven, Olson Baking installed an automatic depositing system, and positive results showed up immediately, Miller says. By using the automated depositor, the bakery has reduced the number of employees on the line by one-third.
Sweet goods line
To supplement its product lines, Olson Baking began operating in March a high-speed, automated sweet goods and Danish line. Increased demand came from Gai's, which said it no longer was making sweet goods and asked Olson Baking to take over this production.
Because the original manufacturer of the line had gone into bankruptcy, Olson Baking found a consultant who trained employees to use the line properly. "We had to reprogram the computers, regear the motors, and relocate the production line," Kirkpatrick says. The line originally produced three to four packages of eight items to a package per minute, but now produces as many as 15 packages per minute.
The sweet goods line is now "totally programmed," Kirkpatrick says. He adds that the bakery has three basic formulas for the line, and the only variables are the roller heights and appliances used. The employees working on the line have been there since the line started and "are becoming production experts," Miller says Olson Baking wants to extend the shelf life of the entire sweet goods line. "We have a shelf life of 12 to 14 days, but we are looking for 20 to 22 days," Kirkpatrick says. To achieve this extended shelf life, Kirkpatrick; has asked vendors to submit plans. At presstime, Olson Baking has seen some improvement, but has not yet achieved its desired goal.
As part of the switch from manual to automated production, Olson's purchased a computerized 400-liter vertical mixer for the muffins and cookies. "We have increased our mixing capacity by more than 300% and everything is preprogrammed by formulas," Miller says. In addition, the mixer has been a reliable piece of equipment, having been
down only once for repairs in two years. "On many formulas, we've been able to go with one-stage mixing instead of three stages with our previous equipment," Miller adds.
While adding employees, Olson Baking found itself with a multicultural work force that spoke nine major languages, and English was not dominant. "We had to figure out a way to communicate with and motivate our work force," Kirkpatrick says.
The company selected employees who would be "translators" for the managers and developed visual aids to show fellow workers how things should be done and how baked products should appear. "We daily examined the process to determine the allocation of resources," Kirkpatrick says.
Having assembled a more stable workforce, Kirkpatrick and Miller developed teams for each of the work areas and told the employees "we're not where we want to be in terms of efficiency." Efforts are underway to increase production efficiency through daily process analysis, daily feedback, benchmarking of expectations, and gain-sharing.
Future growth
Having gained success in the supermarket business by focusing on the customer, Morrie Olson Sr. applies that same philosophy to his new baking venture. "The one thing that should set us apart from anyone else is the quality of our product," Olson says. To attain the quality requires a multi-faceted effort.
For example, Charlie Olson, who oversees finances and information technology, is developing and implementing an IT system for the plant that encompasses everything from sales order entry to ingredient inventory and from accounting to distribution.
Kirkpatrick and Miller are examining options to upgrade cake decorating. I cant begin to tell you how many requests we've received from bakeries to be their cake source, including wedding cakes," Olson notes. To accommodate this demand, Olson Baking is looking to completely remodel the cake decorating area and install additional i automated equipment to allow production of 500 layer cakes per hour instead of the current 250, Kirkpatrick notes.
Product expansion and extension
are only two of many ways Olson Baking is moving forward "we have a lot of room for growth," Morrie Olson says, "but it has to planned and targeted to achieve the maximum efficiency." Toward that end, he is spending much of his time on developing a sales force. And he expects growth to come from existing customers, not new ones, because they are continually demanding more products from Olson Baking.
Although he does not say exactly how much money he has invested in the bakery, Olson admits to spending millions of dollars on upgrading and automating the equipment. He acknowledges that this new venture will require a lot of time and effort. But he is not afraid of spending money and devoting a large chunk of his time.
With a solid foundation, Olson Baking is pursuing its twin goals of supplying in-store bakeries with a wide variety of consistent, baked foods at sufficient volume to justify operations. And Morrie Olson reassures people that complacency will not occur at The Olson Baking Co. for it will always be a work in progress.
Raw materials and paper goods are stored separately, brought into production and packaging rooms according to scheduled need. Doughs are prepared in batches on two Peerless horizontal mixers, equipped with double-arm mixing elements. Finished doughs move by trough from the mixer station to each of the two APV Baker (Werner Lehara) indirectly fired tunnel ovens.
A variety of depositing stations allow Archway to produce wire-cut, rotary moulded, bar, deposited and flip-style cookies on the same high-production line. The choice of indirect fire heating meets Archway's needs to keep moisture in the cookie, rather than drive it out.
Cookies travel a long run-out oven belt before they transfer to the cooling line infeed. Icing fountains and granulated sugar depositors are linked into the line to top cookies, as required. Small nuggetstyle cookies are tumbled in powdered sugar toppings after they cool, but most other Archway styles are topped or iced while still oven-hot.
