Food & Drinks Case Study

UK brewer's bottling plant

Bottlenecks removed, throughput increased

Increased line OEE by 45%

The bottling plant within a major UK brewery

A beer bottling line had been commissioned for a substantial capital investment
Commissioning on the whole had gone well but the team were unable to get the line to achieve the required OEE to justify the investment.
The line was rated at 1200 bottles per minute but was only achieving 900 bpm
Several suppliers had been involved supplying their own equipment on the line. At this late stage politics and overtaken logic and no progress was being made
Goodwill from suppliers had now evaporated each blaming someone else's equipment

A small team was formed with the goal of improving the line performance
Carried out detailed analysis of the accumulation and line studies
Good areas of accumulation at the filling end - identified the packaging area as key bottleneck (packaging area consisted of a labeler, a multi-pack former, tray former and palletiser, each from a different supplier, with little accumulation between them).
Examined of a series of photo-eyes upstream and downstream of key equipment (looking for the presence of bottles on the line). Although these worked correctly, the short conveyor spaces between key units resulted in a loss of synchronisation between units when problems occurred. As a consequence individual units went into a series of ‘stopping and starting’. This had major impact on line performance and caused additional reliability issues.
The team subsequently re-wrote the line balancing logic and moved the positioning of some of the photo-eye sensors.