How Intersnack turned a production shutdown into a two-minute fix

Spreadsheets that couldn’t do the one thing they were needed for

Intersnack is one of Europe’s leading savoury snack manufacturers. At its Netherlands sites, keeping production lines running depends on having the right people qualified for the right tasks. For Sonja van Dijk, Education and Training Manager, tracking all of that used to mean juggling multiple spreadsheets across three separate locations.

When the team went looking for something better, they quickly found that most alternatives weren’t much of an improvement.

“When asking about certain functionality, their answers were, ‘No, that’s not possible. You’d need to use an Excel spreadsheet to achieve that,'” van Dijk said. “My immediate response was, ‘But that’s exactly what we’re trying to do away with.'”

AG5 could do what the others couldn’t. Even more crucially, it could do it across all three Intersnack sites at once.

Three sites, finally on the same page

Getting three separate locations onto a single, aligned system wasn’t straightforward. To achieve this, AG5 worked alongside the Intersnack team through the configuration process.

“All three of our sites are now on the same page,” van Dijk said. “We’d never have been able to achieve this on our own and we’d probably still be using three separate systems.”

Version management – keeping training matrices consistent and current across locations – had been a persistent headache. That problem is now gone.

You can spot a gap in your staff’s training at a single glance.

Sonja van Dijk

Education and Training Manager, Intersnack

The day production suddenly stopped

The value of a live skills matrix tends to reveal itself in moments of pressure. For van Dijk, that moment came when a key employee called in sick and the caramel mix production line ground to a halt, as nobody else on shift was qualified to run it.

“Suddenly I thought to myself, ‘Hang on a sec, let me look in AG5.’ I could see at a glance that there was someone else working in another department who was qualified to run our caramel mix line. We were back up and running in no time,” she said.

That’s the operational case for skills visibility in a single anecdote. Without AG5, the line stays down. With it, the answer is already there.

Planning that actually works

Beyond the reactive wins, Intersnack’s training function itself runs more smoothly. Van Dijk now has a training schedule visible across all Dutch sites, with production line supervisors able to see upcoming courses and sign up team members directly.

“They simply pull up a list on their display: ‘OK, who’s working where? And who needs training?’ They know exactly who needs to attend the next training course,” she said.

Missed training sessions, previously something you had to remember to reschedule manually, are now visible in the matrix the moment they happen. This saves hours per month in the training department, and results in a production floor that no longer depends on a single employee’s knowledge.

It’s all so much clearer now. I only have to enter our training courses into AG5 and touch base with our production line supervisors.

Sonja van Dijk

Education and Training Manager, Intersnack