The bottlers we have worked with over the years here at InfinityQS are committed to providing consistently produced, high-quality beverages. Their customers have come to expect that consistency—and their brands are built upon it. But it can be difficult for bottling companies when they attempt to standardize plant operations and processes without
visibility—across processes, products, and plants.
Quality is critically important to bottlers. Profit margins are thin, and they can’t afford mistakes. A high-speed filling line regularly fills 90,000 cans per hour. If you accidentally fill the wrong product or employ the wrong container, you can’t just dump the cans and start over. Instead, that product must be thrown away. It’s immensely wasteful and expensive, the kind of mistake that quickly erodes those slim profit margins.
The
Enact® cloud-based quality management solution enables comprehensive control across an entire bottling organization, from incoming materials and ingredients to finished product. It’s a great fit for the industry.
Why Enact is Perfect for Bottling
Enact is a software-as-a-service (
SaaS), cloud-native quality management solution, built for the enterprise, which brings bottlers a new level of visibility into their entire organization. The benefits of a comprehensive SaaS solution include significant reduction in IT expenditures; flexible, real-time data collection; centralized data storage; and unmatched accessibility—just a few of the numerous ways in which a SaaS platform like Enact can improve your business.
The visibility that Enact provides is exactly what bottlers need—enabling you to identify and prevent quality issues at every step of your operations, from receiving to filling, all the way to packaging and palletizing. Enact ensures consistency and compliance—while helping you reduce overfill and waste, cut costs, and improve productivity.
Enact provides the insights you need to ensure quality at every stage, turning the data you collect into a valuable strategic resource.
Enact for Your Bottling Plants
Enact’s powerful features support plant-floor operations in real time.
Bottling Process diagram
Some reasons why Enact fits just right with the bottling industry:
- Role-based dashboards – Users see only the information they need to do their jobs and the real-time data they need to adjust and improve operations on the fly. And dashboards make the operators’ lives easier.
- Timed data collections – Tailored reminders ensure that critical quality checks and data collections take place on time, every time; and the software lets supervisors know when checks or collections are missed, too. Enact keeps everyone on the same page.
- Lot genealogy – A map that can guide you to the root cause of a manufacturing problem and help you mitigate any issue better and faster.
- Automated data collection – Collect measurement values from a multitude of data sources—regardless of data format.
The Importance of Centralized Data
Centralizing information from across all your production lines, sites, and even suppliers, means bringing all your quality data together in one place—it’s the holy grail of manufacturing. Enact data centralization means no more data “silos.” Quality professionals and supervisors can view manufacturing data from across the entire organization—and uncover
insights for overall operational improvements.
You can then slice and dice your centralized data with Enact’s powerful, flexible, and proven analysis tools in multiple ways, uncovering critical information—across plants, lines, products, shifts, and suppliers. This enables you to significantly improve quality levels and consistency across your entire organization.
With enterprise-wide visibility, you can:
- Ensure corporate quality standards are followed at all plants
- Prioritize the process improvements that will make the biggest impact
- Develop best practices to improve product quality across the organization
- Reveal opportunities for greater productivity and profitability
Net Content Control
Enact supports the bottling industry’s need to conform to federally regulated net content control requirements. Jason Chester, InfinityQS Director of Global Channel Programs, discusses net content control in detail in his
blog series (definitely worth a read). Jason says, “Net content control ensures that consumers get what they pay for. Laws protect consumers from (intentional or unintentional) ‘shorting’ of the contents of any product they purchase. Consumers expect that the packaging contains at least as much product as the amount stated on the product label.”
Net content control features are built into Enact. Whether you need metrics specific to fill volumes by product, fill head, or production line, we support them—metrics for maximum allowable variation (MAV in North America or T1/T2 in the European Union), or label-stated weight statistics.
With Enact, bottling companies get the information they need in order to run their fill lines in the most efficient ways while complying with regulations.
Changeovers and Verifications
New product changeovers happen frequently on each line, and the same product can be produced simultaneously on various production lines. The number of fill heads, filling lines, product varieties, and container options converge in the bottling industry to create a wide range of details that must be managed to produce safe, high quality products.
If you have hundreds of different combinations of your bottled products that can be run on a single production line, our software supports
product code verifications. Verifying the product code helps operators ensure that you’re running the right product, on the right line, and at the right time.
And operators can easily verify that the correct expiration date code is found on the product they’re about to run. They need only scan the code on the can or bottle, and our software verifies that expiration dates are correctly calculated.
These simple yet powerful verifications make a changeover easy, and they ensure that errors are eliminated. Does the date code match? Is the container (special runs included) correct? Is the mixture (i.e., flavors, diet, etc.) right? Is the container size correct? Setup for a new run on a given production or fill line is made quicker, easier, and hassle-free with Enact.
Enact Analysis
Enact’s unique
analysis methodology simplifies decision-making and enables effective, continuous operational improvement.
Sample Enact Analysis Dashboard - Filling Lines
Analyze any quality data across your enterprise. Dynamically view information from across plants, lines, and suppliers using role-defined dashboards, or perform ad-hoc analyses on any data. Enact enables you to drill down through your data using a wide variety of analysis and statistical tools (
control charts, Pareto charts, Box & Whisker charts, and more).
Minimize Overfill
As InfinityQS COO, Doug Fair, mentions in our
Food & Beverage blog series, when bottling companies “invest in a solution to improve quality on their fill line (and in the rest of the operation), their expectation—naturally—is some sort of growth. And it should be. These companies want to prevent quality problems from happening, and refine and improve processes, thus improving their bottom line and further solidifying their brand reputation. Investing in quality control measures is much more than just a necessary evil, or another expense. Moving to a statistical process control (SPC) solution is an investment in the future.”
Discussing fill-line issues, in particular “overfilling,” Doug reveals a common problem: on the surface, everything seems okay, or “in-spec.” However: “Focusing on one line, we revealed that although everything was within their specification limits, they were still
overfilling every bottle… The data gathered was turned into insights that identified discrepancies in fill-head performance, product-to-product differences, the effect of speed on filling, and other information [the company]
never had. As a result, they were able to make a variety of improvements (some bigger, some smaller), which ended up saving them over a
million dollars per year—on just that one line.” Those are the kind of savings every bottler would love to make. Those are the kind of savings Enact can provide.
Emphasis on Safety: Lot Genealogy
Lot genealogy is a key capability that helps in the efficient management of quality or product safety issues. Lot genealogy can help prevent bad products from being delivered to clients—and can accelerate the removal of bad products from store shelves. In Enact, the
Lot Genealogy Reporting and
Lot Assignments work together to provide a powerful way to track components or ingredients used in lot type manufacturing.
Lot Assignments Enable Lot Genealogy
Lot Assignments support lot genealogy by allowing input lots (or components) to be assigned—or linked—to an output lot (or finished goods). Enact uses this information to track which components are used in specific output lots—and which output lots contain a particular input lot or component.
Sample Lot Assignments
Lot assignments contain
part recipes—specific sets of inputs and outputs—to ensure accurate lot tracking. The example above shows the Lot Genealogy Assignments landing page with input lots assigned to each output lot.
Lot Genealogy Reporting
Lot genealogy reports provide manufacturers with more visibility into the specific input materials that were used in each lot—greatly accelerating the troubleshooting process. Substandard raw materials can be identified, and lots using them can be quickly identified. This information can then be used to ensure more effective supplier management.
When customers or regulators request compliance information, you can now quickly respond with both a list of the materials that were used in any of your production lots and specific quality data—helping demonstrate compliance to customer and/or regulatory requirements.
If a product recall is ordered, you can quickly determine which lots were affected, and can work with partners to rapidly remove them from store shelves.
Sample Input and Output Lot Genealogy Reports
Time to Move to Enact
Today, beverage bottlers face enormous pressure to outperform their competitors—in an industry with slim profit margins. It’s no longer a matter of keeping up; now you must stay a step ahead. Enact gives you the power to ensure comprehensive control across your entire bottling organization.
It’s time to transform your business…with Enact.
Take advantage of the technology at your fingertips today: contact one of our account managers (1.800.772.7978 or
via our website) for more information.
Learn more about Enact and about how InfinityQS works with the bottling industry in these detailed white papers: