The man behind Britain's Best Factory

To an ordinary bystander it must have looked like Patrick Mroczak had taken badly to lunch. "I had my head down and was gripping the tablecloth so hard that I thought I was going to yank the whole thing off," says the operations director, describing the excruciating wait for the Factory of the Year to be revealed at the Best Factory Awards finals at the Park Lane hotel, London, last month. "The presenter was talking through the winner's qualities and one voice in my head was saying, 'it's got to be us'," Mroczak adds. "But then another part of my mind was thinking, 'no, it can't be, we're up against so many big companies'." Anxiety, self-doubt and then from agony to ecstasy in the course of two words as Tony Wallis of Toyota Material Handling announced Aimia Foods had won the big prize. A shrieked "yes!" from the Aimia table. Hugs and congratulations, followed by Mroczak's 60-mile smile lighting the way to the winner's rostrum. "We were over the moon," he recalls. "Then I just felt shell-shocked. I just couldn't believe it was happening." The sight of Mroczak letting his colleagues take to the stage first is symbolic of the Aimia man's selfless management style. "I can be the leader," he reflects. "But if you don't have any followers then you're never going to win. I thank all the staff for getting on board." And colleagues have done just that during Mroczak's three-year spell at the Haydock factory. Aimia has grown turnover, cut inventory, created jobs and recouped £250,000 through shopfloor-led continuous improvement. Quality and service levels are soaring, and Aimia has notched up a series of market-first product developments for the consumer and trade-branded beverages it supplies. "The magic ingredient is knowing where you want to go," remarks Mroczak, who was born in Belgium where he graduated with an electrical engineering and control systems degree before moving to South Africa, picking up an engineering HND and a local twang. He moved to the UK with his English-born wife and pursued a career in the food manufacturing sector. In roles at Arla, Nichols (as Aimia was previously known) and Burton's Foods, he developed a keen appreciation of lean, Six Sigma and the Toyota Production System. Mroczak credits these philosophies and learning from contemporaries – after winning two sector prizes at last year's BFAs – as the catalyst for Aimia's 2012 triumph. "We went to the Best Factory Conference and really listened to what previous winners did. We picked up ideas like the Hoshin matrix." That matrix has helped turn inert corporate strategy into active daily tasks that matter to the men and women on Haydock's shopfloor. Aimia's workers are treated like trusted partners, empowered to stop the line if they have quality concerns and initiate investigations seeking improvement. Their activities flow back to the boardroom via 'information corridors' lined with KPIs, goals and values, plus live shopfloor screens that act as the nerve fibres of Aimia's improvement. Not that you'll find Mroczak and his senior team deliberating over all the data from a back office PC. "When you talk to people about changing the culture, one of the biggest things is to manage from the shopfloor. If we didn't do the gemba walks then we wouldn't be where we are today. If they see you in there, leading and putting into practice what you preach, then you get respect." Little surprise then that Mroczak, little more than 48 hours after the BFA win, has already toured the factory on a personal homage to the operators who ensured the triumph. "I think they would describe me as knowledgeable and approachable. A driver who doesn't take no for an answer," he says of his factory persona. "One of the remarks I had was, 'Patrick, we've never seen a director with a screwdriver on the shopfloor'. I simply replied, 'Well you have now, because if something is broken then I'm going to help fix it.'" For the inside story on all the Best Factory Award finalists, see the brochure within this issue or go to the awards website: www.bestfactoryawards.co.uk/winners