It makes chocolate bars, lollies, advent calendars, biscuits, Easter eggs... to name but a few of its products and it produces private label and bespoke confectionery for some of the UK’s largest retailers including some very well known UK brands.
It also specialises in character licensing which means creating a new product around perhaps a well known movie or cartoon character. Kinnerton even has a special factory that is dedicated to producing chocolate products for people with nut allergies.
Here’s a few interesting facts and figures.
Kinnerton made over 10 million Advents last year and over 20 million Easter Eggs this year.
Around 50% of Kinnerton’s product line is seasonal. That means producing Easter eggs for Easter and advent calendars for Christmas. You can’t be late for obvious reasons.
So Kinnerton’s sales and profitability rely heavily on the company’s ability to get new products to market very quickly and efficiently.
Following waves of growth and expansion, the company was starting to become a victim of its own success. With an ever-expanding product portfolio, Kinnerton’s process for new product development and introduction (NPDI) had grown overly complex and unpredictable.
Employees from various different departments lacked visibility into the overall process and struggled to manage the huge volumes of documents associated with such a wide range of products.
This tended to extend the early phase of production and forced product teams to continuously make up for lost time by compressing the later stages of the NPDI process.
So Kinnerton needed to find a way to get its product information and NPDI process under better control. This would enable it to get new products into production faster and get more products developed in the same amount of time. It would also help cut out the ‘fire fighting’ late in the process. Thus, combining mass production with high rates of innovation would then give them an edge over the competition and ultimately of course help the company make more money.
Kinnerton decided they needed a solution that would provide a single source of product information across the entire company.
It had to be open and easy to integrate with other business systems.
It had to provide sophisticated control over product versions and links or relationships between different pieces of information.
But very importantly it had to provide the capability to build the data model that Kinnerton actually needed.
A ‘one size fits all’ data model just wouldn’t cut it. Kinnerton wanted to do it their way. They wanted to differentiate their processes. Not be like everyone else. Where’s the advantage in that they reasoned.
Perhaps most importantly of all, they needed a solution that they could change, adapt and extend. They recognised that their processes would never stand still and would constantly change and evolve. And they know this would happen a lot. They needed a solution that could cope with this churn without breaking and without causing upgrade issues.
They started by looking at various so called ‘business process management’ or BPM solutions. But none of these could really ‘cut the mustard’ because they lacked the basic functionality in nearly all areas.
Recognizing BPM’s shortcomings, Davies investigated PLM solutions after hearing from other industry partners that PLM systems were now providing the kind of functionality that Kinnerton sought.
After evaluating several PLM systems, Davies and his team chose Aras Innovator for its flexibility and ease of deployment.