Re-imagine Quality in Beverage Bottling

When you hold a bottled beverage in your hand, you’re looking at the culmination of an impressively orchestrated, complex set of processes. For years now, InfinityQS has been helping some of the biggest beverage bottling companies improve those processes, transforming their quality performance across the enterprise. Most recently, we’ve been helping them with our cutting-edge, statistical process control (SPC)-powered quality intelligence platform, Enact^®.
 
Quality-driven beverage bottlers around the globe rely on Enact to provide visibility, standardized analytics, and actionable reporting. With a centralized view into bottling processes at every facility, quality managers, quality engineers, plant managers, and corporate leaders can ensure product quality and consistency.
 
In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at Enact and how it can help bottlers with every aspect of their operations. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on receiving, filling, labeling, and packaging and palletizing. (To read details about everything we can do for your bottling operations, please see our white paper.) So let’s dive in. You’ll be amazed at the ways in which Enact can help your organization re-imagine bottling.

The Visibility You Need for Quality Control in Bottling

Enact enables bottlers to identify, and even prevent, quality issues at every step of the process. This ensures consistency and compliance while improving productivity, reducing waste and overfill, and cutting costs. In today’s highly competitive beverage industry, improvements like these can make the difference between reaping profits and closing the doors.
 
Enterprise-wide visibility provides strategic insight that can transform your bottling operations. With shared insights and a centralized view of data, 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

 

Quality Improvement Across Your Bottling Enterprise

InfinityQS Enact is essential in the monitoring of the complex processes involved in bottling beverages. Let’s dive deeply into how Enact provides bottlers with quality management and operational insight at every crucial step and checkpoint in every process.
 

Bottling Process Benefits: Receiving

For busy receiving dock personnel, the ability to record and respond to data from anywhere via Enact’s cloud-based interface helps ensure that required checks are performed from the moment that source materials arrive—before they are introduced into critical manufacturing processes.
 
Operator dashboards are tailored to user roles to:

• Easily confirm that the type, quantity, and quality of materials coming in for every step of the bottling process meet the standards set by company leaders and (perhaps more importantly) customers
• Enable operators to see and compare collected data in real time
• Empower receiving personnel to take timely action when material issues are discovered

As raw materials and supplies enter the facility, personnel check all inputs for acceptability to ensure that they meet your requirements—and customer standards:
 

Compliance & Logistics

• Certificate of Analysis (CoA)/Certificate of Compliance (CoC)
• Logistics/tracking verification

Sugar/Sweetener

• Taste, Odor, Appearance (TOA)
• Micro sample
• Brix
• pH

CO2

• CoA/CoC
• TOA (in water)

Packing Material

• CoA/CoC
• Tampering/damage check

 

Bottling Process Benefits: Bottle Filling, Quality Lab In-process Checks

Over the next several steps, operators and lab personnel use timed sampling to verify that every batch and bottle meet specifications. When you catch defects in real time, operators and shop floor supervisors can act instantly to save costs—and prevent imperfect or sub-standard products from reaching customers.
 
Enact helps ensure required sampling happens on time, every time, by:

• Enabling scheduling of timed checks and automated notifications

• Allowing configuration of separate system alarms for multiple types of defects (including visual defects)
• Enabling collection of multiple types of data for multiple products in a single data collection screen
• Supporting manual, semi-automated, and fully automated data collection

 
In-process checks on the bottling process are essential for reducing waste and overfill, keeping costs down, and ensuring happy customers.

Bottling In-process Checks

• Net contents
• Brix
• CO2
• TOA
• Acid
• Caffeine
• Cap torque

 

Bottling Process Benefits: Labeling In-process Checks

Labels do more than identify a brand; they are essential for compliance with food safety and traceability regulations. Data accuracy and accessibility are essential.
 
Enact provides:

• Integrated data collection for label verification using predefined defect lists for efficiency and accuracy
• Date code evidence collection through direct image capture and storage
• Centralized data storage
• Instant data availability for audits, reporting, and analysis

In-process checks in the labeling process benefit from a flexible and adaptable quality software platform as operators conduct and oversee manual, semi-automated, and fully automated data collections.
 

Labeling In-process Checks

• Photo evidence collection
• Cap angle
• Fill height
• Label placement
• Kickouts

 

Bottling Process Benefits: Packaging and Palletizing In-process Checks

Correct checks at the packaging and palletizing stage provide the documentation needed to ensure that bottlers can trace where products are shipped, when they left the plant—and that recipients can track the origination point of shipments.

With Enact, you can capture essential documentation and:

• Improve responsiveness with data and notifications instantly available to users
• Mitigate damage to your brand if defects are discovered
• Respond to audit and customer documentation requests in minutes
• Create customized reports
• Consolidate quality, preventative control, and other data across one shift—or multiple shifts on multiple days

 
For bottlers and their customers, visibility in the packaging process is crucial for tracking in the event of a problem with the quality of raw materials or finished products.

Packaging & Palletizing Checks

• Package label verification
• Package date code verification
• Photo evidence collection

 

Re-imagine Quality: Transform Your Business

Today, beverage bottlers face enormous competitive pressure—in every area and stage of operations. It’s no longer just a matter of keeping up—you must now stay a step ahead. Enact gives you the power to transform your operations to keep up…and move ahead.
 
The Enact Quality Intelligence solution offers you a proven, cost-effective method for implementing real-time SPC and continuous process improvement efforts.
 
Many leading bottlers around the globe already enjoy the benefits of InfinityQS solutions. Now, it’s easier than ever for your team to do the same.

Again, to read all the "juicy" details about everything we can do for your bottling operations, please see our white paper.
 
Take advantage of the technology at your fingertips today: contact one of our account managers (1.800.772.7978 or via our website) to learn more about how Enact is breaking down barriers for bottlers like you.