Rexam’s Milton Keynes factory ‘Highly Commended’ in Best Factory Awards

Rexam, the world’s largest beverage can manufacturer, is delighted to announce that its Milton Keynes plant was Highly Commended by the judges at the Best Factory Awards held on Friday 18th September.

Judges Highly Commended the factory in the Best Engineering Plant section of the awards at a glittering ceremony at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, Hyde Park, London.  The winner of this category was Gripple Ltd, from Sheffield which makes wire joining devices for use in agriculture.

It was the first time that Rexam, which has 22 plants globally, had entered the awards and the company was delighted to have been given Highly Commended status. “The award is a celebration of how hard we work here at Rexam, “said Liam Cairns, Plant Manager at Rexam’s Milton Keynes plant. “It recognises the passion, leadership and commitment of the people at the site. It highlights just what can be achieved by focusing on customer satisfaction, the development of people and the driving of operational excellence and innovation.”

Liam Cairns added: “We would like to thank the organisers and sponsors of the Best Factory Awards who have created an excellent platform for factories to, not only compare themselves to world class operators, but, via the audit process, to find areas for improvement.

“Of course we would also like to thank all the people involved with the Milton Keynes site. The award would not have been possible without the great people we have, both at the site and at our head offices and sister factories. Thanks also go to our customers and suppliers who work with us, driving us to new levels of performance and service.”

Best Factory Awards (BFA) is run by Cranfield School of Management in partnership with the magazine Works Management and sponsored by Barclays Commercial, DAK Consulting, The National Skills Academy for Manufacturing, Siemens, TBM Consulting and Unite the Union.

Rexam entered the awards to establish how it compared to other UK manufacturing plants as the judging process is driven by a benchmarking of each site’s performance against the rest of the industry. There is a wide ranging assessment which includes Employee Measures, such as accidents rates, length of service and training levels; Inventory Measures for example raw material usage and inventory days; Process Measures such as lead times, change over times between products and innovation rates Service Measures such as  delivery performance, customer returns and first time pass rate.

Liam Cairns explained: “We at the site knew how much work and effort everyone over the years has put into continually improving the site in line with Rexam’s strategic objectives, so we all felt that we would be in with a chance of winning. In the past year alone we have focused on improving health and safety across the site and improving the skills sets of new starters and existing employees. Nothing stands still and we will keep on improving.”