Success story
Pepsi – Reduced Downtime and Improved Quality
- Justify the return on investment (ROI) for future capital projects in plants.
- Provide immediate process visualization to all levels of plant management and staff.
- Develop an enterprise-level platform for future expansions.
- Discover, validate, and quantify opportunities for future capital investments.
- Successfully implement the new system on a new line and on four legacy lines of the plant.
- Manual recording of filler uptime data (filler), which created subjective and inconsistent information.
- Production of more than 30 million cases of Pepsi per year.
- Total payback time for the investment estimated at 2.8 years.
- Elimination of assumptions and guesswork through the collection of consistent and reliable data.
- Achievement of sustainability goals and reduction of the plant's carbon footprint.
- Improvement of line efficiency and product quality.
- Access to real-time production data throughout the plant, including in the employee break room.
- Optimization of employee performance through training based on hard data.
Pepsi Bottling Ventures (PBV) of Garner, North Carolina, is a Pepsi bottling plant, the third largest manufacturer and distributor of Pepsi-Cola products in North America. It operates in 27 bottling facilities and distributes more than 100 different flavors and brands. Such dimensions gave them a very small margin for error, as Scott Jamison, Vice President of Engineering at PBV, stated:
“We have to make the right decisions every day because it has a big impact on our results”
Line Efficiency and Product Quality: the Must Have to be Achieved by PBV
And how to arrive at such success in decisions? It was not as simple as changing the way of working: they needed a solution capable of working both on the four legacy production lines and with the new direct filling line (DBF). In addition, this should ensure line efficiency and product quality, considering that they had such narrow margins.
After a long work of research and comparison of several systems, at PBV they opted for the AVEVA solution. Among other reasons, because it allowed to add functionalities internally, while expanding and solving system problems by their own internal personnel.
The AVEVA solution, which includes many AVEVA solutions in one, has been installed on the five lines of the Garner plant. This solution has allowed PBV to analyze its data accurately and see what factors were really impacting its critical production operations. Flexibility and access to production data have been essential to adapt to daily changes in flavors, bottles and secondary packaging.
Goodbye to Manual Processes: a Nod to Sustainability
The elimination of manual data collection work has not only been reflected in an improvement in traceability, but also as one more step to achieve sustainability goals and reduce the carbon footprint of the entire company.
As a result, PBV has been able to optimize employee performance and focus on overall line performance, rather than having to address specific machine or operator issues. The successful implementation of this solution has motivated PBV to consider its extension to other plants in the United States.
