Vibrant Foods is one of Europe’s largest South Asian food groups, importing, distributing and manufacturing a wide range of food and drink through its well-known brands.
To support their continued growth, the business decided to invest in automated shop-floor data capture to improve performance visibility and replace outdated manual processes. As part of a wider operational improvement programme, we led the digitisation of data capture and reporting across its two largest production facilities. This included supporting supplier selection, system implementation, bespoke report development, and embedding the new data into ongoing performance forums.
Fighting Fish was founded in 2024 to address a common gap in manufacturing organisations. Many teams need access to high-quality, sustainable, and insightful reporting they can rely on day to day.
Our mission is to deliver best-in-class reporting that brings clarity, focus, and meaningful action to operational decision-making.
We approached the work in three stages, starting with selecting the right system for the sites, then managing the installation and embedding it into daily routines, and finally building reporting that turned the new data into action.
We started by working with the site team to define what they actually needed from automated data capture, then drew up a shortlist of four suppliers. We then assessed each option against clear criteria, covering cost, ease of use, operational and technical functionality, integration with existing systems, and ongoing maintenance requirements
Ultimately Redzone was selected as the preferred connected workforce solution, on the strength of its intuitive interface and breadth of functionality.
We project managed the Redzone installation, reaching go-live 10 weeks after financial sign-off by coordinating Vibrant Foods' operations, engineering and IT teams alongside third-party hardware contractors.
Alongside the rollout, we supported the operations team to configure the system's reference data, including a full reset of product groupings and target rates, and standardised downtime reason codes across all 31 production lines.
After go-live, we worked closely with site champions to embed Redzone into day to day routines, making it the core tool for performance conversations, action tracking, meetings and communication.
To maximise the value of Redzone, we developed a bespoke Power BI reporting suite, ‘Vibrant Metrics’, giving the site team clearer visibility of performance and of where the biggest improvement opportunities lay. The dashboards combined Redzone data with the site production plan, health and safety logs and quality trackers, creating a single, unified platform for reviewing performance.
Alongside overview and deep dive pages built for quick interrogation of the data, we set up automated daily and weekly performance summaries, so the team spent less time gathering data and more time acting on it. We then used the new suite to reset the site performance forums, including a fully digital SQPDC daily operations meeting and a new monthly planned rates review, allowing for easy comparison between actual and planned production rates across more than 2,000 SKU combinations.
"The additional dashboards developed by the team are really informative with great visibility. They have allowed the finance team to challenge operational performance and track benefits a lot more clearly."
Lewis Savage, Finance Business Partner
Vibrant Foods set out to replace manual data capture and get better visibility of performance. Twelve months on, the site has automated data capture across all 31 lines, reporting that people actually open, and a team confident enough to run the system themselves. The headline outcomes:
"You have played a fundamental part in making Redzone the success it is onsite. You laid and set the foundations from the start and did so much work in the background that other people didn’t even know had happened.
With the additional reporting, you took time to get to fully understand the business then work closely with departments and individuals to create dashboards that would generate all the information that was required, which are so easy to use. I truly mean it when I say it has been a pleasure working with you.”
Andy Dawson, Continuous Improvement Manager
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Whether you're already using Redzone or still weighing up automated data capture, we'd be glad to come and spend a day on site, then share what we find and where we think the biggest opportunities are. For existing users of Redzone, that means a full review of your rollout against our Redzone Implementation Scorecard. If you're earlier in the journey, it's a conversation about what good would look like and what it would take to get there.
There's no obligation attached, and every site we visit gets our honest read based on the nuances of your operations. If you'd like to take us up on an assessment, or just want to hear more about how we work, please get in touch with the Fighting Fish team at hello@fightingfishltd.com.
We work with manufacturers to turn operational data into something people actually use. If you've got a problem you think we could help with, or you'd just like to talk it through, we'd be glad to hear from you.
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