Why a Swiss chocolate maker’s $10,000 digital fix delivered more growth than million-dollar expansions—and what Canadian executives can learn from looking inward instead of outward.
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Text originally published at: Smith School of Business
At Helvoria Foods (not its real name), a medium-sized Swiss food manufacturer, leaders confronted that question head-on. Demand for their signature chocolate bars was rising. But efficiency was slipping, and margins were eroding. Their decision to look inward rather than outward holds lessons for every Canadian business leader trying to solve today’s productivity paradox.
The Helvoria production facilities certainly looked busy: Orders were flowing in, and machines were running. But beneath the surface, capacity metrics told a worrisome story. Schedule attainment, the share of planned production completed on time, was stuck at just 66 to 69 per cent. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which captures losses from downtime, slow running and defects, hovered at only 56 per cent. Changeovers lasted more than an hour each, resulting in the plants losing the equivalent of 94,000 bars per month in revenue that could have been captured with smoother operations. Clearly, the factories were underperforming compared to industry benchmarks.
While all the core products showed losses, the Caramel Bar stood out. It alone was losing 51,000 bars every month to downtime, waste and changeovers. The obvious solution was to add another line to one of the factories. But Helvoria’s executives paused and asked a different question: What if we already have the levers of growth but aren’t using them?
Helvoria’s successful turnaround is not a story about costly expansion or new technology. It’s a story about leadership discipline, anchored in what can be referred to as the 3P model: People, Process and Progress.
Executing on three levels
People: Before, operators spent shifts waiting out downtime, were retrained without clear guidance and rarely received recognition when things went right. Under the new regime, workers were put back at the centre of operations. Teams were given cross-training to boost flexibility. Standard operating procedures were translated from text-heavy manuals to easy-to-follow step-by-step visuals. Lean Kaizen routines created space for small but steady improvements. And recognition replaced blame. The effect was immediate: Operators stopped being passive line-runners and became active problem-solvers.
Process: With workers engaged, discipline followed. Lean tools, such as SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Die), were adopted to cut changeover times from hours to minutes, letting factories switch products faster and recover lost production capacity. Batching and sequencing minimized unnecessary stops, while smarter scheduling cut idle hours. Blocks of time that had been disappearing each week were now available to meet rising demand.
Progress: Helvoria managers made progress visible. Performance metrics, once buried in reports, were now tracked daily, creating accountability up and down the line. With a lean metric like OEE publicized, downtime and slow running were impossible to ignore. Throughput, which measures the rate at which the plant produced saleable products, revealed how much revenue could be generated with the same resources. With greater accountability, OEE jumped from 44 per cent to 73 per cent, and throughput increased by 1.6 million units a year.
The lesson is clear: Technology doesn’t replace discipline, it amplifies it. Without standardized processes, dashboards are just noise. With them, they become game changers.
Bringing the lessons home
Why should Canadian executives care about the experience of an underperforming Swiss manufacturer? Because the story is painfully familiar. The OECD has warned that Canada’s productivity drag stems from underinvestment in digital adoption, underutilized talent and a tendency to equate growth with capital spending. That’s the same trap Helvoria fell into before it reversed course.
Tariff uncertainty only sharpens the challenge. For executives, macroeconomic volatility is a reminder that tying growth to expensive capital projects is risky when trade rules can change overnight. The safer hedge is flexibility, unlocking capacity inside existing operations rather than betting everything on new ones.
Helvoria’s experience underscores five lessons Canadian leaders can apply now:
Hidden capacity beats new capacity: Canada’s decade-long productivity plateau is not about insufficient assets. It is the result of underused assets. Like Helvoria, many firms already own the capacity they need but lose it every day to inefficiency. As of the first quarter of 2025, Canadian industry operated at just 80 per cent of its production capacity.
People-first transformation is a multiplier: Canada chronically underutilizes talent, particularly women, immigrants and younger workers. Helvoria proved that empowering operators with skills and recognition turns them from labour inputs into productivity multipliers.
Lean and digital synergy are in lockstep: The OECD warns that digitization without process discipline fails. Helvoria’s 3P model shows that lean principles set the stage for digitization to be sustainable. One without the other is wasted effort.
Flexibility builds resilience: From tariffs to supply chain shocks, Canadian firms know disruption well. Helvoria weathered seasonal surges not by adding production lines but by creating flexibility within the ones it had.
Start small, scale fast: Fearing complexity, executives often stall on digital adoption. Helvoria’s AI- based digital layer pilot project proved that starting small with $10,000 and one pilot line can yield results quickly and allow managers to scale with confidence.
Canada’s productivity paradox is the product of underused people, invisible waste and leaders who equate growth with capital expenditure. The Helvoria Foods story shows another path: Smarter, not bigger. By empowering people, tightening processes and layering affordable digital tools, Helvoria met seasonal peaks, unlocked millions in hidden revenue and positioned itself for long-term growth — all without expanding capacity.
The next time you are asked to approve a multi-million-dollar capital expense, ask yourself: Did we do everything possible unlock the capacity already in plain sight?
Sai Srikar Desina is an MBA candidate at Smith School of Business. He acknowledges the guidance of Geoffrey Pond, Assistant Adjunct Professor of Operations Management.