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The Cake Crew is a family owned business producing a wide range of bakery products. We are the largest independent manufacturer of private-label cupcakes in the UK. After a decade of growth reaching £25m turnover the company came through Covid, Brexit and rising inflation battered bruised and losing money.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
When I came in to take over the business I knew our factory was broken by the figures, lack of leadership, waste and labour were both sky high and we simply had no cash. I thought at the time that if we just got a decent interim in that would fix it.
Finlay, our interim MD, was the first leap of faith we took. He arrived when our chins were on the floor and we did not know where to start. I looked at him in disbelief when he said “trust me, in 6 months we will be laughing but I can’t do it on my own. You need a team of troubleshooters to do the different things you need to do”. When you have a broken business with no money everything is expensive, but I’d been right to trust Finlay and I had to trust again.
Martyn King of Chasm came on site, plain speaking, direct; he just knew what he was talking about.
The changes started to happen from day one. The Chasm team came in, did their analysis and reports, brought their energy and know how, rolled up their sleeve and they were literally part of Team Cake Crew. Martyn is totally invested in our success and supported by his Chasm team. They create this critical mass of resources that brings headspace, capacity and momentum leading to buy-in and crucial early results.
First up was a better planning and scheduling tool to convert the sales forecast into a production demand. Next was converting the production demand into daily schedules. With this came our new planning rules of the house, created around a fixed repeatable schedule. We now make the same products on the same day every week in the same order we just change the number.
Chasm got traction on 2 major cash flow drains (wastage and labour), particularly in material over usages, worked on automations, balanced shift numbers so we had the correct number of people at work, and balanced lines.
That is just the beginning – Chasm are now onto the management control system and working with us to develop a structure of roles & responsibilities, competences with which to operate, and help build our IT infrastructure and ERP capability.
What can I say? The changes start to happen and you just think ‘oh wow you guys know what you are doing’. I thank Chasm from the bottom of my heart.
I would recommend anyone to take the leap of faith and engage with Martyn King and his team at Chasm. Genuinely a great team of honest, talented, hard-working manufacturing experts.
– Ruth McCarthy, CEO The Cake Crew