Why beverage companies need a Digital, AI powered, Operational Excellence platform.

There are several reasons why beverage companies may need an AI-powered digital operational excellence platform in their filling and processing sites. In this article I will share 6 key reasons:

1.     Automation: An AI-powered Operational Excellence Platform, that drives improvement as well as robust management processes, can help to streamline and optimize production processes, reducing the need for human intervention and minimizing the risk of errors. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity, which has a measurable positive impact on the bottom line.

2.     Advanced analytics: AI-powered analytics can help to analyze large amounts of data, providing insights into areas for improvement and identifying new revenue streams. This can help to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve decision-making within the company.The connection of people, processes and highly automated equipment ensures what we call the operationalization of the generated data. This is lacking in many beverage companies, who have beautifully designed (digital) boards, but a lack of process to re-utilize knowledge on a global scale, to manage and escalate the right actions into the right performance meeting and to bridge the gap between 'current performance' and 'goal performance' with the help of a root cause analysis process and kaizen or improvement events. The AI addition to the Solvace Operational Excellence Management Platform ensures that the analyzed date is not only driving the right reaction, but ensures a predictive action in order to avoid the deviation taking place.

3.     Quality Control: Quality control is critical in the beverage industry, as even small errors or deviations in production can have serious consequences for the quality or delivery of the beverage products. An AI-powered digital operational excellence platform can help companies to maintain high standards of quality by providing one connected digital operational excellence platform for monitoring and analyzing production processes, identifying and addressing quality issues, and tracking and reporting product defects.

4.     Predictive Maintenance: In the beverage industry, equipment downtime can be costly and can lead to missed deadlines and production delays. An AI-powered digital operational excellence platform can help companies to predict and prevent maintenance issues, thus reducing downtime and increasing the overall equipment effectiveness. Solvace is connected with the maintenance modules within SAP, which creates an exchange of data, enabling both operators and maintenance engineers to operationalize, inform and involve each others actions, driving a better MTTR* and MTBF*.

5.     Compliance: The beverage industry is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and its amendments. Beverage companies are required to comply with these strict regulations in order to produce and distribute safe and healthy beverage products. An AI-powered digital operational excellence platform such as Solvace can help companies to ensure compliance by providing tools for managing and tracking compliance-related processes, such as audits, inspections, and certifications.

6.     Traceability: With the complexity of supply chains in the beverage industry, it's critical to be able to track and trace products as well as ingredients from supplier to manufacturing and distribution. Solvace helps contract fillers, beer brewers, soft drink producers and spirit producers globally to maintain traceability by providing tools for tracking and documenting production processes, recording and reporting product information, and identifying and addressing issues related to product recall. Solvace has developed a specific supplier in order to communicate of specs or other deviations directly with the supplier, being able to track the progress of the analysis with the supplier and solving the issues directly so the quality and speed of contracted delivery can be ensured.

Summarized, Solvace can provide several benefits for beverage companies, including direct connection and integration with automation, advanced analytics, quality control, predictive maintenance, compliance, and traceability. These tools can help beverage companies to optimize their processes, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance and ensuring product quality. Therefore, it can be an essential tool for any beverage manufacturing company looking to optimize and streamline their processes.

Neil C.W. Webers is as chief commercial officer responsible for the global marketing and sales of Solvace. He is author and founder of Performance Behavior and the Big Improvement Resource.

*1. MTTR (mean time to recovery or mean time to restore) is the average time it takes to recover from a product or system failure. This includes the full time of the outage. From the time the system or product fails to the time that it becomes fully operational again.

*2. MTBF is the Mean Time Between Failures. This is the average time between system breakdowns. MTBF is a crucial maintenance metric to measure performance, safety, and equipment design, especially for critical or complex assets, like generators or airplanes. It is also used to determine the reliability of an asset. MTBF is also one half of the formula used to calculate availability.