Improving Bottling Processes & Quality—in the Cloud
Fixing the “Big 6”
A regional beverage bottler faced six tough operational challenges:
›Cross-plant collaboration: The bottler’s “home turf” is geographically vast. Tremendous distances exist between its region’s largest population centers. Those distances made it a challenge for the bottler’s sites to collaborate—so ensuring product consistency and compliance to product specifications was difficult.
›Digital quality management: Collections of production and testing records existed either in Excel or on paper. The people who worked with these records could find the data they needed… but it was a time consuming and cumbersome process.
›Enterprise visibility: Insight into quality and process details—and the ability to drill down into data to drive improvement and increase revenue—would be a huge step forward. They wanted to improve yields and reduce waste, specifically targeting fill control and Brix levels. They also wanted to confirm that their new production lines were delivering higher quality and improved efficiency.
›Standardized training and documentation: The various plants were “islands” unto themselves: each had their own training and documentation for operating the various machines, data collection, and testing. There was some standardization for common machines, but training was mostly localized.
›Robust reporting capabilities: This bottler desperately needed to dig their quality data— to expose ways to drive improvement across the enterprise. Manual data collection was standing in the way of product improvement.
›Compliance: Testing across the enterprise was not visible—to teams or to management— and as such, there was no easy way to determine if testing was regularly performed. This bottler needed to be sure that operators were testing on time, at the right time— every time.
Company Profile: Independent Regional Bottler
This bottler serves as the regional powerhouse behind many favorite drink brands.
This bottler works closely with a variety of customers, brand owners, and suppliers to manufacture, sell, distribute, and market 26 many well-known, global beverages—and also supports the production of a full range of alcoholic beverages.
QUOTE:
The simplicity of data collection, the ability to normalize (and then ultimately aggregate) the collected data, and the strength of the statistical analysis capabilities were big selling points for us. —National Quality Systems Manager, Supply Chain
You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know
Switching to the InfinityQS Cloud
This bottler is part of a global beverage production group, and many other regional bottlers were already using InfinityQS—which was important. This implied that InfinityQS understood the beverage industry and, most importantly, understood how these global bottlers operated. Since InfinityQS was already in place in many plants—and knew how to deal with things such as sugar inversion and other common beverage bottling issues—this bottler took a closer look at partnering with the company.
“Our representatives traveled to see the software in action and found that InfinityQS was not only used—it was accepted and appreciated by all the operators there,” said the bottler’s Quality Systems Manager. “The simplicity of data collection, the ability to normalize—and then ultimately aggregate and analyze—collected data, and the strength of the statistical analysis capabilities were big selling points for us.”
After a thorough needs analysis evaluation, the bottler determined that InfinityQS’ cloudbased solution met their required criteria: employee collaboration, switching from manual to digital quality management, real-time insight into quality, exposing areas of improvement, standardizing training, and robust reporting capabilities.
QUOTE:
InfinityQS was not only used— it was accepted and appreciated— by all operators.
A Phased Rollout = Success
This strategy has three goals: to teach the team how to use the product, to lay a solid foundation for deployment, and to demonstrate success to stakeholders.
- They started with training and setup: they learned the basics and configured the system with a naming convention including parts, testing times, and frequency.
- Next they kicked off a pilot program. InfinityQS engineers visited them onsite, and efficiently configured the product to suit their specific production needs.
- After a successful pilot, InfinityQS’ cloud-based software was rolled out to sites across the enterprise—on main production lines and in syrup rooms.
- The next phase focused on support processes— such as water treatment and specialized production lines—and was eventually rolled out around the enterprise.
- The next phase focused on support processes— such as water treatment and specialized production lines—and was eventually rolled out to the plants.
- This small, focused pilot demonstrated success, and enabled them to demonstrate that cloudbased InfinityQS software was a success.
The End Result?
Conquering the “Big 6”
InfinityQS is now championed by enthusiastic, hard-working representatives from all of this bottler’s plants. Regular work-in-progress (or WIP) meetings with InfinityQS software engineers kept everyone on the same page, kept spirits soaring, and helped move the project along.
InfinityQS helped this bottler conquer their “big 6” challenges via:
› Cross-plant collaboration: Because all data is stored in a single, unified, centralized data repository, everyone views the same information at the same time.
› Digital quality management: The system recognizes all types of data collection devices—simplifying the data collection process and providing alerts to keep collections on time.
› Enterprise visibility: Quality professionals at this bottler are now able to view their processes in real time—and find areas for improvement.
› Standardized training: With everyone operating the same software—across the enterprise—it is easy to share lessons learned, and to promote activities and usage habits that benefit everyone using the software.
› Robust reporting capabilities: This bottler can now quickly and easily drill down into individual KPIs across processes, lines, and plants— to expose hidden trends and focus on areas that require immediate attention. Enact offers more reporting options than any other digital quality management solution.
› Compliance: With InfinityQS’ cloud-based software, testing is now standardized—ensuring that all operators perform tests according to predefined times and specifications. Assignable action codes and cause codes are automatically written to the process event log, enabling this bottler to easily provide compliance documentation.