Britvic’s site production manager, Neil Pickering, explains how we’ve achieved this major productivity gain in partnership with digital manufacturing software business LineView as well as our IT Operational Technology team.
An increase in performance of 9% on one of our production lines equates to around two million extra cases of drinks being produced over six months. This is a significant productivity gain considering it has been achieved separate to any additional investment in manufacturing assets. It’s been achieved purely through digital monitoring of our production lines, enabling us to constantly review line performance, pick up weaknesses early and address them promptly.
As a leading soft drinks manufacturer in Great Britain, we’re constantly looking at how we can invest in our supply chain to increase efficiency and capacity. Over the past five years, we have invested over £250 million in the modernisation of our supply chain. This initiative forms part of an overall technology investment roadmap, to transform our business and supply chain operations, as we work to improve productivity, sustainability, and ensure Britvic is fit to supply the growing demand for our growing portfolio of great tasting soft drinks.
With a commitment to building a company that is fit for the future, we launched a digital manufacturing programme in partnership with LineView, a manufacturing efficiency software company. LineView work with food and beverage teams to understand where losses are occurring in operation systems and find ways of reducing them.
Our project had several objectives, including reducing costs, driving growth by releasing capacity without unnecessarily adding to our asset base, ensuring resilience to support our service to customers, helping meet our sustainability goals through the responsible use of energy and water within our manufacturing process, and improving our strategic decision making through the use of real time data.
In pursuit of these goals, our operations project team worked with LineView to install digital monitoring software initially on nine of the production lines at our Rugby factory, though the success of the project has led to its expansion to six lines in Beckton and five lines in Leeds. The software enables us to do the following:
- Energy monitoring: Meters have been installed to view the use of gas, electricity, water and steam. The data is collected and used to support usage reduction projects, helping to save on our manufacturing costs and support our environmental efforts to save on energy
- Condition based monitoring: Sensors were placed on the key parts of the machines along each production line. These work to alert the team of early signs of machine failure. The team can then react quickly in real time, putting the machines into downtime, so that smaller repairs can be made quickly and effectively before the situation escalates into a full machine breakdown. This quick response prevents costly, time-consuming, and energy inefficient breakdowns that reduce productivity
- Real time monitoring: Live data provides instant insights on the overall equipment effectiveness of our machines. This data can then be used to understand our production line performance and make improvements where necessary
While the project remains in its early stages, we have already seen an immediate capacity increase and reduced the impact of stoppages on our production lines.
This has made a real difference to the way we work. As Danny Coates, our Site Manufacturing Manager recently said: “I'm able to quantify things a lot quicker, so instead of going through spreadsheets and a general update of how a production line ran each shift, we've got historic data at the click of a finger. We can then pull the data over a set date range, to see the true impact of losses and where opportunities really do sit. And that also can be seen across the whole of the business, providing us full visibility. This means not just the site understands how the site's running and where its challenges are, but people all the way through the business can also see and quantify the challenges that we've got and where we can invest to make a meaningful difference to performance.”
Our work with LineView has systemically reduced losses made during the manufacturing processes, allowing our teams to produce the same amount of product for less cost and less energy. This has generated a remarkable return on our investment, and enabled lasting transformations, notably increasing production capacity opportunity at our Rugby, Beckton, and Leeds sites.
Working with LineView has been a fantastic display of the value of partnership, with our IT operational technology team, working exceptionally closely with LineView to integrate this into our sites. Not only has the programme delivered immediate and substantial benefits so far, but the collaboration has also revealed a further in potential capacity gains through enhanced control optimisation. We can’t wait to see how this partnership will deliver further improvements in the future.
Neil Pickering | Site Production Manager
