Sarah Lee Case Study

Welcome back to Momentum. We are continuing our discussion around leadership that is offered here at Buck Mickel Center. we're going to change gears a little bit and talk about leadership from the manufacturing perspective. My guest is Craig Ollinger from Sarah Lee Food Service. Welcome.

Thanks, Wendy.

It's nice to have you with us today.

Oh, it's nice to be here.

Before we get started, tell me a little bit about Sarah Lee.

Well, Sarah Lee, of course, has been around for a lot of years. We've been in this community as a facility since 1984. We purchased this from King's Hawaiian Bakery, basically this is a frozen food services facility that started making fresh bagels.

Great. Wonderful. Now, Craig, we developed a partnership with you - with Sarah Lee Food Service - to understand your training needs. To try to develop a customized program for you. What stimulated you to seek training from the Buck Mickel Center?

Well, it really kind of developed out of necessity. About three years ago, we started producing frozen dough and had a major expansion of this facility. We'd been producing bagels for number of years up to that point. They really needed to be a little more progressive in how we manage our facilities. Specifically in employee empowerment. We you used process based leadership as that tool to help us with that.
Great. Wonderful. How many students went through the program?

About 220.

Great. What were some of the courses that your students or your employees went through?

They went through a whole cadre of different training opportunities - communication, team building, problem solving. They learned hoe to rate each other on their management styles and that's something that I really think is kind of a need when you think about it. We're talking about our associates out on the production floor. Leadership is important on all levels.

Absolutely, now what were some of the results that you saw as a result of going through the training program with us?

Well, the results have been tremendous. The results are great in plant performance. That's where the results truly have really been found is in our plant performance - our efficiencies, our reduced waste, problem solving that our teams do every day. That's just really been quite rewarding.

Wonderful. We're so happy that we could partner with Sarah Lee Food Service to bring you this leadership program, and, of course, we'll always find ways to continue to meet your staffing and your training needs. So, again, thank you very much for being our guest today.

Thank you. Also, I'd like to say Greenville Tech is a great partner as we worked through this.

Wonderful. The partnership that we developed with Sarah Lee - we actually came out a program manager, Carol Beckham came out and we met with you and your staff and we tried to understand where the weakest links, if you will, were within your organization. Based on that, we developed a program. Tell me a little bit about some of your needs.

Well, the program really existed in how do you take 220 employees and train them I and almost a week's worth of training. We were able to do that with some great creativity through Greenville Tech's part and our ability to rearrange schedules.

We do have a wonderful program and wonderful instructors there as well. Craig, tell me a little bit about some of the products. I know that you guys offer an array of bagels. Tell us a little bit about some of the flavors that you manufacture here.

We have many different flavors - over 60 different products that we produce in bagels and it's hard to imagine that there's that many out there. Everything from cranberry-orange to the famous plain bagel that we produce everyday.

Wonderful. I must say I do eat a Sarah Lee bagel every morning.

We appreciate that.

We also - tell us about some of the instructors you used, instructors at Greenville Tech that you work with.

The instructors have been great. Sonny Epps was a real good fit for us. He related to our employees very well. They even called him Sonny.
Sonny is a great instructor. In fact, we had an opportunity to actually visit with Sonny regarding the program. We were very pleased with him and we do get a lot of positive feedback regarding Sonny's teaching skills. We're real happy to say.