Baking & Snack - December 2006 - 34

OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR

Focused

VIEW
Vista Bakery's Bill Hayman manages operations
through empowered teamwork and clear communications.
BY LAURIE GORTON
o manufacturing facility runs by itself. Certainly
not a bakery, and especially not a cookie and
cracker plant that must satisfy not only its own
brand requirements but also those of hundreds
of contract customers. It takes teamwork - lots of teamwork! - to succeed, according to Bill Hayman, vicepresident of manufacturing for Vista
Bakery, Inc., Burlington, IA.
"We've had a team approach in place
for the past 10 years," Mr. Hayman said.
"This enables us to sustain growth at a
profitable level."
Two years ago, Vista was humming
along, well-equipped to provide superior service to its
many private-label and contract customers as well as
handle the in-house needs of its parent company, Lance,
Inc., based at Charlotte, NC. Although Vista managers
were considering another expansion for the Burlington
plant, they looked at it more as a future project than anything immediate. The bakery's management team was
about to face its ultimate test.
In January 2004, a major but financially beleaguered
competitor simply shut its doors, completely cutting off
customer supply. "That closure dropped $120 million
in business into the private-label bakery community,"
Mr. Hayman explained. "Many of those customers went
looking for capacity, and the result was extremely tight
conditions." Those customers threw a great deal of new
demand at Vista, challenging the company's production
capacity and management capability.
Vista's vice-president of sales, Tyler Cook, told the story of the past two years from the inside. Faced with rising
demand, the company encountered an over-capacity situation. "We were shorting our customers," Mr. Cook noted

36 / BAKING & SNACK / December 2006

with regret. One part of the solution was to install two
new oven lines during 2004 and 2005. Then, in October
2005, Lance bought Tom's Foods, a snack company based
at Columbus, GA. "With the bakery facilities of Tom's
acting as additional capacity combined with the two new
ovens, we are now in a situation in which we have a lot of
excess capacity," he continued.
"Over the last 18 months, Bill Hayman has demonstrated outstanding
leadership within our company," Mr.
Cook said. "Despite [the overcapacity]
situation, he led his team through a
very difficult time and completed these
projects as planned. Now, with idle capacity in 2006, Bill
has managed to lead a cost-cutting effort to continue to
hit our goals despite less-than-expected volume. Facing
almost the complete opposite of 2005, Bill and his team
have continued to perform terrifically."
He added, "Bill has a reputation of being a champion
for his people. He is seen as an honest, caring and respectable manager."
For these reasons and more, Baking & Snack named Bill
Hayman its 2006 Operations Executive of the year.
UP THROUGH THE RANKS. "Mine was
a practical education," Mr. Hayman
said with a laugh. Baking was not in
his original career plans. After high
school, he attended University of
Illinois and another small liberal
arts college. He also married his
wife Mary and started a family.
Mr. Hayman's early working
experience was with a transpor-

Baking & Snack - December 2006

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