Quality Control in the
Bottling Industry

Improve yield and reduce risk and waste.

Re-imagine Bottling Quality Control

Beverage bottlers face increasing pressures to provide high-quality product under tight financial and regulatory control. A quality plan is a must, and many bottlers utilize Statistical Process Control (SPC) solutions to help monitor and maintain process and product quality.

InfinityQS® quality solutions provide bottlers with more value from their quality data by enabling better data collection, use, and analytics. A centralized and standardized data repository provides unparalleled visibility and quality insight, helping bottlers to—

  • Improve yield for increased profitability
  • Reduce risk and maintain compliance
  • Tighten net content control to reduce waste
  • Streamline data collection and reporting


Powered by SPC, InfinityQS software provides a single solution for many beverage bottling companies, from small independent manufacturers to large multinational players.

Key Capabilities: Net Content Control

Find greater savings, even for in-spec filling processes.
 


Hit fill targets with greater precision to eliminate waste and minimize overfill—without risking underfill.
For beverage bottlers, syrups and concentrates are among your most expensive ingredients. Waste during the filling process can spike production costs, so profitability relies on eliminating waste and minimizing overfill. Consider: A production line fills more than 90,000 12-ounce cans per hour. What if each can is 3 ml over target?

Imagine the benefits of eliminating that overfill while still meeting net content requirements. Quality solutions from InfinityQS use SPC continuous improvement methodologies to help you meet targets, increase profit margins per bottle—and quickly see ROI.

 

On the Plant Floor: Simplify Data Collection

Integrate software with existing devices to automate data collection.
 
With InfinityQS, you can automate data collection from processes across your plants and production lines. InfinityQS solutions easily integrate with a variety of measurement devices to provide real-time data from across one plant or numerous sites.

Plus, InfinityQS provides user-configurable notifications, alerts, and reports that can unveil useful information from any of your collection devices.
  • Support and streamline automatic, semi-automatic, and manual data collection.
  • Integrate with existing IT infrastructures and ERM systems and standardize incompatible data formats.
  • Surface the data you need, based on your role and priorities.
Operator Dashboard

Across the Plant: Streamline Data Analysis and Reporting

Fast, accurate communications within and across teams are vital for keeping your business running smoothly.
 
The sooner you detect and alert stakeholders to potential quality problems and related costs, the faster you can eliminate those problems. But the overwhelming amount of data in manufacturing today makes it difficult to catch problems quickly. Furthermore, storing data in more than one device or software system—or even paper forms—can derail efforts to avoid errors and perform extensive manual analysis.
 
  • Stop juggling multiple spreadsheets and paper collection forms.
  • Surface the information you need instead of wasting time sorting through irrelevant data.
  • Utilize self-service, on-demand reporting and customizable notifications and alerts.
  • Automate and standardize reporting for clearer, faster communication with customers and colleagues.
  • Get mobile access to data from anywhere through any web browser.
Operator Dashboard

Across the Enterprise: Improve Yield and Increase Profitability

A unique analysis methodology simplifies decision-making and enables effective, continuous operational improvement.
 
Real-time SPC enables fast response to process problems, helping bottlers keep production running smoothly and improving yield. But a quality platform increases the value of your SPC data exponentially. InfinityQS SPC continuous improvement methodologies help you meet targets, increase yield, and improve profit margins per bottle.

By comparing quality across multiple product codes, production lines, and sites, you can also discover and recreate successes across the enterprise.
 
  • Analyze any quality data across your enterprise
  • Leverage patent-pending Data Stream Grading and analysis
  • Enhance collaboration
  • Prioritize continuous improvement projects
Operator Dashboard

Reduce Risk and Protect Your Brand

Get true visibility, standardize operations, and optimize best practices across your entire enterprise.
 

Whether you have 1 site or 100, your success depends on an optimal, consistent level of visibility across every product, process, and line. Time spent tracking inventory slows productivity and can mean potential lost profits. But more important, insight into both raw materials and finished product is vital to your ability to respond quickly to quality issues, meet regulatory requirements, and protect your brand reputation.

  • Quickly trace quality from consumption to supply chain.
  • Track SKU-specific data across lines and sites.
  • Reduce human error with automated, semi-automated, and mobile data collection options as well as automated alerts and notifications.
  • Compile data quickly in response to compliance or audit demands.
  • Identify exactly where to make improvements to provide the best product possible.
Increased visibility—improved quality control for food

Bottling Industry Compliance

InfinityQS delivers built-in functionality that helps beverage bottlers comply with government regulations and industry standards for food quality and safety.

Lot Genealogy and Reporting functionality in InfinityQS solutions enables organizations to track raw material (ingredients) lot codes throughout bottling manufacturing operations. For investigation purposes, genealogical "trees" can be created for any lot. These reports allow you to determine:

  • Materials used in the production of a specific finished lot
  • Where incoming raw ingredients were consumed
  • Root causes of nonconforming lots
  • Information critical for responding to product recalls
  • Which final lots were created from incoming lots

Lot Genealogy reports provide a complete view of the incoming/outgoing product relationship with statistical summary information.

Dynamic Scheduler

Dynamic SchedulerYou can specify unique, time-based intervals based on the product, process, or even the workstation. Windows automatically pop up, clearly identifying when data collections are due. If a failure is detected or if no data is collected, the software can automatically send notifications, email administrators, or even force users to specify assignable cause codes and corrective actions.

Watch the video.

InfinityQS solutions boast built-in checklist and workflow alerting features needed to comply with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) and Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP). You can incorporate workflow requirements at the shop floor level, providing automatic data collection prompts to operators. InfinityQS’s real-time Dynamic Scheduler offers visual checklists to operators, reminding them when to perform HACCP, SSOP, and other critical quality checks.

With InfinityQS, audits are easier with instant access to the quality records and electronic documentation needed to demonstrate compliance. Our robust solution can stand up to third-party certification audits such as British Retail Consortium (BRC), Safe Quality Food (SQF), and ISO 22000—or internal audits. Creating reports takes only minutes instead of hours or days, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.
 

When enabled, Database Auditing provides full traceability for any modification, edit, or change to any database record. Traceability records are easily viewed in a variety of ways, but they cannot be edited. Whenever a record modification or deletion is attempted, the Reason for Change tracking feature forces users to select a reason for the modification from a drop-down list. Additionally, free-form comments are required. When specified, a Change History and Reason for Change Report can accompany any chart printout.

Manufacturers in the bottling industry must also comply with filling requirements for Net Content (weight) Control. The Net Content Control feature supports both the U.S. Department of Commerce Maximum Allowable Variation (MAV) and European Union Tolerable Negative Error (TNE) and T1/T2 requirements, plus related Net Content Control reporting to support the needs of global manufacturers. Many Food and Beverage InfinityQS users see fast ROI based solely on reduced “giveaway” or overfilling of product using the Net Content Control functionality.

Coty

The Sweet Smell of Success

Beauty industry icon Coty exhibits a spirit of innovation that demands continuous operational improvement. InfinityQS software has enabled the company to improve filling precision—resulting in a $270,000 savings and inspiring additional initiatives.
With an eye toward understanding its process capability, reducing overfill, and saving money—across lines and facilities—Coty worked with InfinityQS to execute a focused SPC Fill Height Project across 12 fragrance lines.
Coty used InfinityQS Professional Services to help ensure effective solution deployment. Once the software was implemented, Coty found that it could easily analyze all necessary Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on control charts for easy interpretation and analysis.
With the information it gathered, the company was able to
  • Save $270,000 in overfill on just the tested lines
  • Eliminate overproduction of product to compensate for overfilling
  • Differentiate special-cause variation from natural variation with real-time process information
  • Eliminate time-consuming, after-the-fact quality checks
  • Increase set point accuracy
  • Validate process capability
  • Realize $220,000 in ROI from the Fill Height Project

Download the full case study to learn how Coty worked with InfinityQS experts to get more value from their SPC data.

 

Get the Case Study

Enact: Integral Quality Improvement

When you hold a bottled beverage in your hand, you’re looking at the culmination of an impressively orchestrated, complex set of processes. 

InfinityQS Enact is essential in the monitoring of these processes.
 

Bottling_Diagram

The immediate impact that InfinityQS ProFicient had and the awareness it created was tremendous, much more than I ever thought possible. Now we can look at operations as a whole and make big-picture decisions about what should be done going forward. Management is using data to make informed decisions and plan for the future.
There are many advantages to having a computerized system that sometimes, in the fog of having this powerful tool with its many capabilities, one can over look.
It is ultimately easier for the operator. Even with the minimal computer skills many of the
operators had in the beginning, the overwhelming consensus is that they prefer using InfinityQS
over a paper system.
You can read the data rather than having to decipher the writing of 150 different people. The data is at your fingertips.

Take the first step from quality to excellence