Fluffing mash and IBM iPower Cloud: inside IT at Charlie Bigham’s
It is busy in the kitchen at Charlie Bigham’s. More than 850,000 meals are prepared every week, yet someone still takes the time to fluff the mashed potato on each one.
Meals are made in small batches using fresh ingredients, with people carefully sprinkling the finishing garnishes that make every dish recognisably Charlie Bigham’s.
The company has a phrase for this philosophy: Slowly Does It. Good food should never be rushed. Take your time, pay attention and do things properly because, as Charlie Bigham’s puts it, flavour, like life, is richer when you slow down to notice the details.
Spend some time with Head of IT Mike Calverley and you realise he has his own version of Slowly Does It. His world may involve data, cloud and disaster recovery rather than fish pie and mashed potato, but there is a similar attention to detail and, importantly, a clear idea of where technology belongs.
Growing without losing the magic
As Charlie Bigham’s grew, so did the amount of information travelling with the food.
Fresh ingredients arriving at the Somerset kitchen were recorded on paper, spreadsheets and then in the company’s Syspro ERP system. When the finished dishes were ready to leave, the picking team worked from printed A3 sheets to make sure the right meals, with the right shelf life, reached the right retailers.
The processes involved double-handling information, took up valuable time and left more room for mistakes. They were also becoming increasingly difficult to scale.
Charlie Bigham’s needed a warehouse management system capable of keeping pace with the business and connecting with its existing ERP and food traceability systems.
The company’s Change Council, which brings together people from across the business, considered where the proposed system could make the greatest difference. Mike describes it as “a business project, not an IT project”. It earned its place because, in his words, it offered “massive benefits in productivity, margin and growth”.
The business case came first. The technology followed.
Giving every ingredient a digital journey
The new Indigo warehouse management system gives each ingredient a digital journey to accompany its physical one.
Ingredients are scanned when they arrive and the information follows them through the kitchen. The system connects with Syspro and the Marco technology used to weigh ingredients, bringing together information about what has arrived, what is being used and what is becoming a finished dish.
When the meals are ready to leave, information is sent directly to the picking team’s handheld scanners, helping them find exactly what they need.
For food with a shelf life of just eight or nine days, accuracy matters. The right dish must reach the right retailer with enough shelf life remaining. Mike says picking errors have fallen significantly since the new system was introduced.
Better stock control has also contributed to something Charlie Bigham’s is particularly proud of: becoming one of the first food companies to achieve zero edible food waste.
Automating repetitive tasks has allowed people to move into other roles across the business and left more room for the work that gives the food its handmade character.
Machines may be very good at moving information. They are less good at producing the perfect flourish on a fish pie.
The recipe for a good night’s sleep
A business that operates day and night cannot afford to have a business-critical system disappear when it is needed most.
Recarta designed and built the hosting infrastructure for the Indigo system on an IBM iPower Cloud platform. It is hosted and proactively managed from Recarta’s Tier 3 data centres, helping to keep the data protected, compliant and recoverable around the clock.
The solution also includes a fully integrated high-availability disaster recovery environment. The live system is replicated in real time so that, if needed, Charlie Bigham’s can switch to the disaster recovery system and minimise disruption.
Mike could describe that in terms of recovery times and technical specifications. Instead, he explains what all that resilience actually buys him:
“It allows me to sleep at night.”
It also supports the division of labour he has deliberately created. Recarta concentrates on building, managing and protecting the infrastructure, leaving his internal IT team to concentrate on the business.
“Recarta is great at building and maintaining the right infrastructure, leaving my IT team to concentrate on delivering transformational projects for the business.”
For Mike, it is not simply about having a supplier available when something goes wrong. It is about working with people who understand the business and the part its technology plays within it.
More time for the transformational work
With the underlying infrastructure taken care of, Mike and his team now spend more of their time thinking about integration, automation and data.
Connected systems provide a clearer view of what is happening across the business. That information can then be used to make better decisions and support further growth.
It is technology with a clear purpose: fewer picking errors, better stock control, less repetitive work, greater resilience and more useful information in the hands of the business.
And somewhere above all that infrastructure, integration and real-time replication, someone is still carefully fluffing the mashed potato.
Slowly does it.
