Watson

Founded in 1939, the company creates and produces specialty and general food ingredients for food producers around the world, and is considered to be among the highest quality suppliers globally, with demonstrated expertise in microencapsulation, agglomeration, micronizing, spray drying, and a film technology. Each capability enables the company to develop and produce generic as well as specialty formulations and products. The company engaged an investment banker to assist in selling the company, and the investment banker recommended that the company engage Getzler Henrich (“GH”) to complete an operational assessment targeting manufacturing and warehouse process optimization, inventory management, and value optimization, and implement recommended performance improvement initiatives which the company felt would increase enterprise value.

GH identified and implemented an array of initiatives that generated over $2 million in annual savings and realigned and reduced inventory by an additional $2.3 million. The selected initiatives included implementing

• Facility-wide 5S (Sort, Store, Shine, Standardize, Sustain)
• Inventory Management: Consolidated, repositioned, and dispositioned existing materials while improving scheduling processes to eliminate overall $2.3 million in inventory (both raw and finished goods)
• Communication/Standardization: Implemented huddle boards in production and warehousing which increased employee engagement, increased product flow, and reduced defects (contamination, packaging, storage, damage, and data entry)
• Safety/Quality: Redesigned and tailored process improvements to standardize key processes and develop quality performance standards (third-party BRC audits showed significant quality and safety improvements)
• Additional improvement activities included: implementation of a TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) program, introduction of Quick Changeover/Brush Down/Wash Down techniques, facilitation of line balancing improvements, warehouse productivity optimization, and purchasing process redesign.

Watson was successfully sold to Glanbia, PLC. Services. Solutions provided by GH were directly attributed to the final sale price being $40 million higher than the original estimation.