It took two years and a factory remodel to add Irving’s “secret ingredient” back to the sausages. Unfortunately for Vienna Beef, their over-reliance on tribal knowledge was discovered too late. Had Vienna Beef properly leveraged standardized work instructions to document their core processes, this mistake would not have occurred. So while the facility may have moved, his process knowledge did not. Ultimately, the procedures that Irving were performing every day were not properly documented. While Vienna Beef moved location for good reasons, they underestimated their reliance on tribal knowledge. When the Vienna Beef factory moved locations, the company unknowingly lost out on some incredibly valuable tribal knowledge. How does a highly successful company fail to meet standards after nearly 80 years of a good track record? Unfortunately Irving, the man responsible for the transport, didn’t move with the new facility. This trip to the smokehouse was the missing ingredient. This allowed the smoke to better penetrate the sausages and reach familiar flavor profiles. During this trip, uncooked sausages were slowly warmed as they moved through the various rooms that led to the smokehouse. The combination of travel time and the heat of the rooms that the sausages travelled through was the reason for the flavor and color difference. The ingredients and spices were all the same, maybe it was the water source at the new facility? Was the new equipment impacting the taste? On all accounts, it seemed nothing had changed to the production process after the move to the new facility. Jim Bodman, Vienna Beef Same Spice,Different Dogs The hot dogs were all pink instead of bright red.” “They tasted ok,” he says, “but they didn’t have the right snap when you bit into them. Jim Bodman, the Chairman of the Vienna Beef company had this to say about the problem: With a long history of customer loyalty and product consistency, you can imagine the shock that management experienced when their famous dogs lost some of their renowned qualities. Unfortunately, when production began at their new facility, product consistency took a turn for the worse. Each time a customer bites into one of these hot dogs, they expect the same consistency that the company had been reliably providing for 79 years. The signature product of the Vienna Beef company is their natural hickory-smoked Vienna sausage. After the company made the transition to a new production facility, their staple product changed - and nobody knew why. We recently came across a radio segment that outlined a similar problem that Chicago-based Vienna Beef had with their hot dog production. What if your core revenue driver was suddenly different. Imagine that you lost the ability to make your key product.
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