Customer Succes stories
Royal Borgesius
Find out how Royal Borgesius is revolutionising bakery operations nationwide with AgileWalls, improving visibility and collaboration at every level.
Improve performance with AgileWalls
The collaboration between Borgesius and AgileWalls
Borgesius is one of the largest and oldest bakery companies in the Netherlands. Headquartered in Bunschoten, the company supplies various types of bread and dough to over 1,000 Albert Heijn shops and nearly 100 in Belgium from nine branches across the Netherlands. Philip Uythoven, Senior Manager of Continuous Improvement at Borgesius, is well aware of the importance of visual management and Obeya. He uses the walls of AgileWalls to make performance management tangible, visible and workable at different levels of the organization.
In recent years, Borgesius grew and became a strategic partner of Albert Heijn. With that increase in scale also came the call for professionalization. Since early 2024, Senior Manager Continuous Improvement Philip Uythoven, together with his colleagues from the Operations Management Team, has been working on that professionalization drive from Borgesius’ headquarters.
The core of his assignment: create a culture of continuous improvement at all levels in the organization.
Obeya
The assignment is right up Uythoven’s alley. The Lean specialist worked for years as an executive and programme manager in the chemical and tobacco industries. In this role, he set up several Obeyas internationally. “Obeya is deployable in many industries,” says Uythoven, “it’s about creating a space where you share information visually to achieve process improvements together.”
Together
For Uythoven, togetherness is at the heart of Lean work. “My motto is ‘see together, understand together, act together’. ‘Together’ is the key word here. You don’t work hierarchically top-down but, from shared ownership of the challenges and solutions, together on organizational goals. And of course with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and as much as possible based on measurable data.”
Making it visual
Central to the Performance Management approach at Borgesius are three key-moments:
- Day start on the production floor in the branches
- Periodic meeting in which trends for each branch are discussed on a 4-weekly basis with part of the national Operations Management Team (OMT)
- The national OMT meeting, in which all data from the 9 bakeries come together and improvement actions are defined.
In these meetings, the walls of AgileWalls are an important tool. Uythoven: “Day wall, Periodic wall and OMT wall are all arranged in the same way. This makes it immediately clear to anyone entering the room what the status is. That way, discussions are not about form but about content.”
“An action item that you put on a board by hand is more ‘yours’ than an action item that someone else adjusts on a laptop.”
Philip Uythoven
Senior Manager Continuous Improvement, Borgesius
Day start
The Day start meeting is a prime example of this, Uythoven says. He is regularly present as a spectator, a bit in the background, to see what happens. Every working day, those responsible for the Borgesius bakery’s performance, such as a production manager and a head of technical services, have a short stand-up. “They stand at a spot close to the shop floor near a large wall board measuring about 2 x 3 metres. White overcoats on, hairnet on their heads.”
Using the AgileWalls Day Board, they discuss the previous day’s performance, including deviations from KPIs and actions to be taken. “This involves very concrete things: how many loaves of each kind were baked, how many were rejected, any complaints about quality, machine downtime, the impact on costs, and so on.”
Togetherness
At the top left of the Day Board is Borgesius’ royal logo, above the columns are the four result areas: Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost. In the boxes below are graphs and tables showing how performance compares to the agreed KPI standards. Occasionally, someone walks to the wall to place a concrete action item in a transparent frame on the board.
Uythoven: “That is the added value of this way of working. The conversation is important. During the stand-up, everyone sees the dashboard and contributes information and ideas. Moreover, a different manager is always the facilitator of the Day Meeting. That all adds to the collectivity and commitment.”
Digital or physical Obeya
In the preliminary phase of the Lean implementation, a digital dashboard was also considered. In the end, the choice fell on a physical wall board from AgileWalls. Uythoven: “The advantage of a real board is that you don’t need a laptop, no network connection, no projection. Moreover, it is less distant. An action item that you manually place on a board yourself is still more ‘yours’ than an action item that someone else adjusts on a laptop.”
Visuele Obeya
Visual management
Operational data clearly and continuously visible
For each department
Specially designed for each department
Teamwork
Emphasis on ‘seeing together, understanding together, acting together’
Continuously visible
For Philip, it’s important that the information is always visible. “They are always there, not just during stand-ups. In the chemical company where I worked before, they used folding hinge boards, in another company there was a glass-only meeting room in the central hall. Everyone passed by there and saw the boards. AgileWalls does the same, in a clear and attractive way.”
Reducing material loss
The first focus of Borgesius’ Continuous Improvement team is to reduce material loss during the production process or afterwards. “In a bakery, material is lost at four stages: before the oven, after the oven, through overweight and through so-called ‘overbread‘.”
Before the oven flour may fall from a bag or dough from a conveyor belt. A failure of a conveyor belt or the oven can also cause material loss. After the oven bread can be lost during slicing or packing, for example if a package tears. Uythoven: “These deviations are sometimes simple to solve with an aid, a different set-up at the machines or adapted instruction and training.”
From Overweight is when a bread contains more ingredients than the legal minimum under the Bread Act. “Weighing more than legally required means loss for the bakery. So we look for an optimum between what is minimally required and the accuracy our process can handle. We also monitor this by comparing the weight of inputs and outputs. Sometimes a root cause analysis is needed to find out the root cause.”
Overbread indicates overbaked bread. Uythoven: “We bake according to certain baking windows, time slots and order. We do this on a forecast from the AH shops. But during baking, the final orders for each shop come in, and they almost always deviate. An optimum is then sought between our bakeries and the various shops, but sometimes bread is left over. We call this over-bread. We try to solve this by optimising forecasts and also by baking in a smart order and testing whether that works.”
“People reacted enthusiastically to the AgileWalls prototype. One branch manager even immediately asked ‘When can I get a board like this?'”
Philip Uythoven
Senior Manager Continuous Improvement, Borgesius
Obeya pictures
Some photos of the Obeya
Results
In the short time we have been focusing on Material Loss, we first gained an understanding of the categories and reasons for material losses. The KPIs and their visualisation are important tools. “Everything that gets attention is already improving. We see from the measurements that the outliers are going out. Performance is becoming more stable. We are not there yet, we have to push on now, and I am confident that this will continue.”
Professional look
Some Borgesius branches were already working with a simple whiteboard with A4 sheets on it. In Uythoven’s view, that works in itself. “However, we chose AgileWalls partly because of its clarity and professional look. The cooperation was also pleasant: good accessibility, quick response, thinking along with us. The design of the signs was tailored to our company, with appropriate colours and our own logo. Even the crown in our logo was playfully incorporated into the other cups. As a result, the sign really became something of our own.”
Mobile
Day and period signs have now been installed in almost all bakeries. Some of them are mobile. “This has the advantage that the boards are not only used during meetings, but can also be moved afterwards to the canteen, for example, so that everyone can see the performance of their own bakery and assess where they can have an impact.”
Enthusiastic employees
Uythoven met positive reactions to the boards, including at a national employee meeting with a cross-section of the company. “They reacted enthusiastically to the AgileWalls prototype I showed. One branch manager even immediately asked ‘When can I get a sign like this? Another manager soon wanted a Week Board too, as a link between the Day Board and the Period Board.”
Flexibility
Uythoven: “The walls offer a good mix of standardisation and flexibility. On the production floor, the need appeared to hang the ‘Successes’ tile in a more prominent spot, and that was easy to adjust. And when we appeared to need something visual to quickly display performance per KPI of Green (positive) or Red (negative trend), I came up with Nick from AgileWalls to put sliders on the boards that you can set to Red or Green. Handily arranged.”
Wishes for the future
The preliminary results of Continuous Improvement are satisfying, but Uythoven also likes to look ahead. “Functions other than Operations, such as Commercial, Product Development, HR and Finance can also start working this way. My dream is one room with several wall boards. Not just Period boards, but also Project boards and a Year board. In such a Obeya, you have all the information visually available to, for instance, as MT, set up and further develop an update of the multi-year plan and new focus based on results every year. That can help us make really big strides.”
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