Bridge Cheese has scooped two prestigious awards for the way it has harnessed digital technology to improve the business.
The company picked up the Made Smarter Award for the Marches area and the Made Smarter Adoption Award for the whole of the West Midlands area at the ceremony held in Birmingham.
Made Smarter West Midlands is a £1.9million project to encourage manufacturing and engineering businesses to adopt digital technologies to improve productivity and competitiveness, create new jobs and increase skills.
The awards were held alongside the Insider Made in the Midlands Awards, which recognised the products, innovations and ideas generated by Midlands manufacturing businesses over the past 12 months.
Bridge Cheese was named winner of the Marches award ahead of fellow shortlisted firms Ludlow Nut Company, Planet Doughnut Ltd and Wrekin Sheet Metal. The firm was also named overall winner of the Made Smarter Adoption Award for the West Midlands region.
The Telford-based company was established in 2018 and supplies various types of cheese to the food production industry. It has enjoyed phenomenal growth each year, but directors Michael Harte and Martin Bowden knew they needed to improve monitoring and processes if the success was to continue.
When spreadsheets and paper records were no longer enough, Telford & Wrekin Council’s business support team directed Michael and Martin towards the Made Smarter programme.
Made Smarter digital expert Martyn Mangan recommended allowing Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) to audit the business to identify barriers to growth and recommend solutions.
WMG produced a digital roadmap, setting out a plan for the steps needed to digitise the business over the next three to five years, including the installation of a fully-integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
This system handles everything from tracking orders, stock taking, monitoring machine uptime and downtime and producing instant quality control reports.
Once fully up and running, it is expected that the ERP will save time and resources and help productivity to rocket even further.
