New Belgium Brewing: Finding more time to bottle as customer demand grows

The operations management team at New Belgium Brewing took a close look at its bottling lines and realized that they were producing 150,000 cases each week on lines that were capable of producing 294,000 cases.

“After ramping up the work week of our bottling line, we were disappointed to find that brewery was producing only about half of the product the line was truly capable of producing. That’s when we realized it was time to look at how to rectify this situation, so we called on Apex and their team of software engineers to help determine next steps in achieving full production capabilities.”

Joe Herrick
Packaging Systems Manager
New Belgium Brewing

The folks at New Belgium Brewing found out that valuable packaging time was being lost during both scheduled and unscheduled downtimes and the management team realized it was time to implement a solution that would improve performance.

“We had been using the paper-based system for a long time around here, but with the product volumes our staff was now faced with managing, this system could no longer cut it. With the various changes in beer mixes and packaging options, the chance of error when maintaining these records manually significantly increased the chance for human error. It was time to step up to the next level of automation so that we could accurately manage scheduled and unscheduled downtimes.”

New Belgium decided to implement a performance solution using the Wonderware Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software with the help of system integrator, Apex Manufacturing Solutions.

More on this in my next post.

More information

Please visit the following links if you want to know more about the Wonderware solution at New Belgium Brewing:

1. The Wonderware Food and Beverage page
2. The Wonderware Supervisory and Control page
3. Wonderware InTouch
4. New Belgium Brewing Homepage
5. New Belgium Brewing Sustainability