February 14, 2025
Innovation is all about groundbreaking ideas and radical transformations for many. But what about incremental innovation?
What is innovation? The invention of the car, lab-grown alternative proteins or the leaps we’re seeing in generative artificial intelligence? If you ask Uday Chouhan, Director of World Class Manufacturing & Quality Supply at Tetra Pak, another side of innovation is just as important.
“You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “Sometimes, the real power of innovation is in steady, purposeful improvements.”
The power of incremental innovation
This mindset of continuous improvement is at the heart of World Class Manufacturing (WCM), a globally recognised methodology and certification that focuses on optimising factories so they can increase quality and safety while reducing costs, time and resource use.
“Technological breakthroughs often make headlines, but incremental innovation tends to be overlooked,” says Uday. “The WCM methodology provides a framework through which small, purpose changes can be made over time, leading to big results.”
Instead of betting on high-risk, high-reward innovations, WCM optimises existing systems and helps factories fine-tune every aspect of their operations by measuring, benchmarking and improving until they achieve the top level. It’s a long-term commitment, often taking 15 to 20 years for a factory to reach the World Class level of certification, but the results are worth the effort.
“Technological breakthroughs often make headlines, but incremental innovation tends to be overlooked.”
“Big ideas that push the innovation envelope often require big changes and investments. There’s potentially a bigger reward, but there’s also more risk of failing,” Uday says.
What started with two pilot teams in 1999 has become a global organisation where every colleague across every factory reaches for perfection: zero material and resource losses, zero accidents, and zero quality issues. And it’s not just limited to the manufacturing plants themselves – the goal extends to the business of customers as well.
How World Class Manufacturing directly benefits customers
WCM is a comprehensive approach that touches every aspect of production. It’s one of the Lean programmes, essentially a collection of principles, techniques, methods, values, and tools that help improve a factory in accordance with overall business needs.
“For us, it’s always about each customer’s unique needs. If you’re in a constrained market, you can’t sell more even if you produce more, so the focus is on becoming more quality and cost-competitive. If you have capacity constraints, on the other hand, you have an opportunity to sell more if productivity increases,” says Uday.
WCM's structure is built on 11 foundational pillars, from safety and quality to cost deployment and maintenance. Together, these pillars form a holistic system that ensures every aspect of the manufacturing process is consistently optimised. Focusing on each pillar makes it easier to ensure quality and efficiency, even in high-demand environments.
Packaging quality, for example, has to be consistent: “Today’s package should not look different from yesterday’s, or it will affect brand image. There are a lot of duplicate products, so we have to ensure everything from appearance to functionality is consistent.”
No sustainability without profitability
Over the years, the improvements inspired by WCM have helped Tetra Pak reduce customer complaints by almost 90% and improve safety by over 80%. WCM also helps optimise costs by reducing waste and resource use.
“There’s a direct correlation between resource consumption and costs,” says Uday. “That’s why the biggest objective is to reduce resource consumption, things like energy and water.”
With a growing list of sustainability goals factories must meet, WCM's environmental pillar is also becoming more important—and the methodology often makes it possible to reach them ahead of schedule.
“The environmental pillar includes climate and social concerns. Factories produce emissions and impact their local surroundings, and we have to make sure we’re disposing of waste correctly and being conscious of how we use local resources,” says Uday. “And at the end of the day, there’s no sustainability without profitability – and vice versa.”
“There’s a direct correlation between resource consumption and costs. That’s why the biggest objective is to reduce resource consumption, things like energy and water.”
Some customers have saved up to 60% on water and chemicals used for cleaning tanks. Across Tetra Pak’s own factories, it’s also been possible to reduce tonnes of water per million pack by over 80%, waste by 65%, and electricity consumption by as much as 30%.
Change management and collaboration are key
The success of WCM isn’t just about systems. Change management is key – and WCM doesn’t work without collaboration.
“WCM isn’t about function-focused activities,” says Uday. “It’s not like the production team only concentrates on producing and the quality team only on quality.”
The pillar structure ensures that every effort takes a holistic view. Every pillar consists of members from different functions, which ensures a balanced approach to every optimisation project, whether it’s productivity, quality or cost.
“With WCM, you have groups that focus on production, but not in isolation. There are quality people, planning people, and someone from safety to balance all perspectives and ensure that whatever levers we pull, we can mitigate and ensure nothing is negatively affected. That ramping up production, for example, doesn’t end up posing safety issues,” says Uday.
This way of working affects everyone from production managers to the people on the line – and so communication is key.
“You don't look at it from a functional point of view. You look at it from an organisational benefit point of view. And when you change your thinking from a small piece to the bigger picture, you get a more holistic way of doing things,” says Uday. “The better you communicate, the better people understand, and the more you communicate, the more it becomes part of the culture.”
Balancing innovation and standardisation
While WCM might seem like a rigid framework, it actually encourages creativity. For example, there’s a lot of focus on creative problem-solving.
"The beauty of WCM is that one of the evaluation criteria is how creatively you’re working to reduce losses. We spend time thinking up new ideas and ways of working, and if one factory comes up with a better method, we try to standardise it across all our operations.”
One recent example is a tool developed by a factory team to address an issue with aluminium foil missing at the edges during the production of packaging material. This defect creates internal waste during manufacturing, but the new tool has made it possible to improve waste management and production reliability since it’s no longer as dependent on manual intervention.
"The beauty of WCM is that one of the evaluation criteria is how creatively you’re working to reduce losses. We spend time thinking up new ideas and ways of working.”
The challenge is to thoroughly study this local innovation and standardise it across all factories. Not all innovations reach this level of standardisation, but they are all evaluated to determine whether they should be standardised based on their benefits.
“Typically, it can take about six months to see if a solution is viable across other factories,” Uday says, considering different product mixes produced in those factories. “When something works, we make sure it’s implemented everywhere so customers worldwide can benefit from innovations and improve not just consistency of quality and operational efficiency but also reduce the environmental impact of their factories.”
Small steps – giant impact
While six of Tetra Pak’s factories have reached the top level of WCM, Uday is confident that more can be added to the list in the future. But he’s not about to lose sight of priorities.
“It’s always about safety first. If you know how to do it safely and with good quality, you can always figure out the fastest way.”
The journey toward zero losses, accidents, and quality issues is a pursuit without an endpoint—there’s always room to improve.
“We talk about zero loss in WCM, but even if you reach that goal, can you guarantee it will stay at zero? It’s an aspirational number, and until you reach it, there’s always work to be done,” says Uday. “And at the end of the day, we want to achieve more than just internal improvement—it’s about empowering customers to reach their own safety, sustainability, and quality goals.”
Learn more about how we help factories rethink their resources, reducing energy, water, chemicals and waste across their operations and supporting them in reaching their efficiency and sustainability goals.
