How Flora Food Group Commissioned a New Paperless Site

New Site Commissioning: An Opportunity for Modernization

The commissioning of their facility, with four production lines for plant-based spreads and a primary line with sublines for vegan cheese facility, represented a challenge for the organization. Not only were 95% of their 120-strong workforce new hires but the greenfield site was equipped with 70% new equipment sourced from OEM providers across Europe. To hit the ground running, they decided to leverage the full power of the Poka platform.

Because the equipment was predominantly new, they were only able to migrate 5-10% of existing work instructions and standards from Rexdale. Establishing a paperless factory from the get-go required Brantford to expand their Poka usage, integrating digital work instructions, troubleshoots and forms alongside issues management.

A paper-free production process contributed to Flora Food Group's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. It would also provide comprehensive, factory-wide standards, enhance safety controls and allow workers to troubleshoot during commissioning to minimize downtime rapidly. New plants often experience higher turnover and training, and many new hires on that much new equipment were going to take quite an effort.

As equipment was commissioned, Arif assigned a staff member to film the OEM providers’ initial sessions on equipment settings and instructions in Poka’s resource library. These recordings were an invaluable resource and were later used to create training skills, work instructions, and troubleshoots - allowing employees to adapt quickly to the new factory environment and troubleshoot unfamiliar equipment as effectively as possible.

Flora Food Group also took the opportunity to reimagine their approach to developing work instructions. Rather than hiring an external consultant to create commission documents, they boldly chose to democratize content creation so every employee in the factory could contribute. After some initial training, associates harnessed any downtime to record videos and write work instructions, following a uniform style. They used Poka to compile their work, building an internal knowledge base of 250 work instructions over the course of a year.

This strategy offered several benefits. Creating work instructions in-house instead of hiring a third party saved approximately $300,000. Additionally, as associates mastered a process to create work instructions, they built up their expertise to become trainers. The training team organically grew from a single admin, with process experts now able to shoulder some responsibilities for on-the-floor training and assessments.