Background

Harte Companies is a family-owned, Ossett-based group that designs, manufactures and installs bespoke shopfitting’s, predominantly in the food retail and cosmetics sectors. The company launched in 1973 and has built up a strong reputation for quality, innovation and service, trusted by brands such as Aldi, B&M, Home Bargains and Estee Lauder.

The challenge

The company operates in a highly competitive marketplace. To stay ahead, and grow the business, it needed to improve the capacity of its operations and look at the efficiency of its processes and systems by adopting lean manufacturing techniques.  

The solution

Through our Innovation and Leadership services, we provided one-to-one tailored support and access to £1100 grant funding. This allowed Harte to make strategic improvements in three core areas:

1. Increasing employee awareness and engagement of 5S methodology to better organise the working environment and drive efficiency.
2. Developing a continuous improvement tool to enhance the firm’s systems and processes and to support lean manufacturing.
3. Carrying out a process-mapping programme to improve process flow and eliminate inefficiencies.

In addition, we enabled Harte to engage with a coach who has helped its leaders focus on culture change and create a vision for future growth. The employee and leadership training are provided by our key partners at The Leadership Centre in Leeds Beckett University, through our Leadership service.

The impact

Thanks to our support, Harte’s leadership team has been able to implement several key improvements such as 5S, lean manufacturing and process mapping.

Through these new efficiencies and process innovations, the company can now increase capacity to fuel growth. There is also improved stock control, which will reduce waste, and wider engagement of 5S across the business. The introduction of new performance objectives and goals for each area of the firm is supporting the drive for continuous improvement.

“The programme of training and development for key members of our operations and production teams will enable Harte to deliver leadership-based innovation initiatives, that can be cascaded throughout the business. This will have a materially positive impact on our efficiency and capacity. The programme was easy to set up via our growth manager and the support of Exemplas.” Kevin Davey, HR Manager

Learn more about our Innovation service

If you have a business based in West Yorkshire and are interested in working with our expert team of Innovation & Leadership Managers, express your interest in our programme here.