Keeping Success Flowing Strong

Nestlé Waters, the world’s leading bottled water company, maintains its leadership position through continuous improvement efforts—starting with a major initiative to improve quality and operational visibility across its production facilities. With a portfolio of 48 brands produced in 87 manufacturing sites operating in 30 countries, Nestlé Waters needed to standardize operations with a system that would allow them to easily monitor, review, and trend real-time quality data across all their facilities. With InfinityQS solutions in place, Nestlé Waters now has real-time visibility over production processes—both within the individual sites and from the corporate level across dozens of factories. Using InfinityQS, the company is continuously improving products and processes.

Company Profile

Nestlé Waters, the world’s leading bottled water company, has built a solid reputation on the quality and purity of its products.

• Established in more than 100 countries
• 87 manufacturing sites
• operating in 30 countries
• Portfolio of 48 brands
• Annual revenue over $8 billion
• Market share of 11%

Results

• Central Statistical Process Control (SPC) solution enables visibility of production processes—across multiple facilities.
• Real-time visibility tools enable more effective decision making.
• Computerized data output eliminates need for manual documentation.
• Reduction in manual documentation increases overall efficiency.
• Real-time alarms—with assignable cause and corrective action entries—streamline quality control process.

The Need: Real-time, On-demand Information at Their Fingertips

Nestlé Waters had been using a cumbersome, paper-based system to collect and analyze data. When issues arose that required immediate attention, the company’s quality engineers had to disrupt operators on the production line to retrieve the necessary data.

Nestlé Waters’ goal was to implement a system that would enable them to easily monitor, review, and trend real-time quality data. In addition, they wanted to standardize on one solution—across all their facilities— to complement their existing IT infrastructure.

InfinityQS Professional Services & Software

Facilitate Workflow

After a thorough needs-analysis evaluation, Nestlé Waters determined that InfinityQS® solutions best satisfied their criteria for quality documentation and analysis. To accelerate and streamline the software implementation, the Nestlé Waters IT team leveraged InfinityQS Professional Services. These expert services are provided by teams of skilled, certified quality engineers, industrial statisticians, and Six Sigma Black Belts— all with extensive manufacturing experience.

The teams worked closely during all stages of the implementation, including planning, implementation design, and project management. From an IT standpoint, the implementation focused on two separate manufacturing units: Retail Manufacturing and Home & Office Manufacturing. They spread the implementation across 16 Retail sites, as well as eight Home & Office sites, and integrated them with corporate headquarters.

The Retail objectives were to:

› Upgrade all factories to the latest InfinityQS software release

› Organize the purchase of PCs required for workstations

› Image new PCs to the Nestlé Waters standard and install InfinityQS

› Ensure that the project leader had all necessary rights and permissions to access the servers

The Home & Office objectives were to:

› Format existing servers

› Install SQL databases and InfinityQS on the servers

› Purchase new PCs, image, put users in the user group, and grant necessary permissions and access

The Takeaway:

InfinityQS solutions provide a high level of built-in configurability. If you are also looking for this level of flexibility, our Professional Services teams can help you configure your Quality Intelligence solution so that it works the way you do.

Accelerating Process Improvements

Track Trends to Make More Accurate & Timely Decisions

With InfinityQS solutions in place, Nestlé Waters now has real-time visibility over production processes—both within individual sites and at the corporate level across dozens of factories. By tracking trends in quality data, they are able to make more accurate and timely decisions about process improvements.

Nestlé Waters is using InfinityQS SPC software to review sampling frequency optimization and inline monitoring, as well as to track quality improvement projects such as:

• Cap torque and application analysis, supporting retail factories in comparing different cap vendors
• Lightweight bottle initiative, enabling process optimization to ultimately reduce unnecessary full bottle testing
• Air-consumption process data capture automation, using analysis functions to optimize production processes

Improve Event Response Times

Get Usable Insights for Employees at Every Level Other improvements have come at a practical level. “You can read the data rather than having to decipher the writing of 150 different people. The data is at your fingertips,” said Julie Chapman, Quality Systems Manager at Nestlé Waters.

Nestlé Waters is also taking full advantage of InfinityQS’ realtime alarms. Any events that occur require assignable cause and corrective action entries. Plant floor operators review, evaluate, and respond to any events that occur—before they cause quality issues.

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