 Pepsi Bottling Plant Deploys FactoryWidgets® Desktop Displays
To Enhance Continuous Improvement, Increase Production Efficiency
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Nampa, Idaho – Pepsi Bottling Ventures is the nation’s largest privately-held Pepsi-Cola bottler, operating 28 bottling and distribution facilities that serve more than nine million consumers across the U.S. The company’s plant here in western Idaho supplies four beverage distribution centers in the Pacific Northwest and has contributed enormously to the parent company’s successful operations with its impressive performance. It’s done so despite the fact that it’s the smallest facility in the company’s nationwide network of bottling plants.
In operation for just five years, the Nampa plant was originally equipped with a combination of new equipment and inherited legacy production systems. With only 20 production employees producing more than four million cases of soft drinks each year, management has had to work smarter as well as harder. The results are superb, however, and the leading-edge Nampa plant ranks among the most efficient in the organization.
This positive result is due primarily to management’s ongoing review and adoption of the latest in operational and information systems that enable the staff to implement continuous improvement programs and increase production efficiency over time.
The latest such enhancement is the deployment of FactoryWidgets™ software package developed by Apex Software Development, a division of Apex Manufacturing Solutions in Boise, ID, and sold and supported by Software Toolbox in Charlotte, NC. The “widgets” are simple, no-hassle and affordable mini-applications that display user-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) on desktop PCs without the need for thick client software or even an Internet browser. They enable any personnel to monitor activities that impact their work.
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FactoryWidgets on a Pepsi Bottling Ventures production manager’s desktop help him stay on top of quality and operational indicators and achieve operational effectiveness that rivals much larger facilities.
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“We’ve been using the FactoryWidgets for just a little more than two months and they’ve already been very well received by our people,” said Chris Bacon, Production Manager at the Nampa plant. “They’re an unobtrusive reporting mechanism that people at all levels of technical knowledge can understand and use for monitoring real-time data for both primary and ancillary management needs.
“This is important because in our industry, just to stay competitive, we have to run with leaner head count,” Bacon added. “The widgets allow us to set up both primary and ancillary tasks to run in the background right on people’s computers. When they need to check that data, they now can do it right on their screens rather than having to go out to the physical equipment, which frees up personnel time for more value-added tasks rather than occupying them with documentation and record-keeping.”
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“This new capability frees up at least an hour a day per person, which is equivalent to adding another person to the staff, free of charge – and that’s a wonderful initial return on investment (ROI),”
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A Central Data Hub
The Nampa facility is fairly typical in that it has Wonderware™ HMI workstations on the plant floor that enable operators to interact with the production processes. In addition, since the quality control staff wear a lot of hats, they also work on the plant floor. In those instances, if someone is out on the floor and something goes wrong, they can use an HMI console to see what’s going on and acknowledge alarms, start or stop machines or whatever action is appropriate.
While in the lab, however, they typically don’t need that level of detail or interactivity. They are collecting and analyzing running samples, filling log books and manually entering data into the Wonderware systems. It’s now easy for them to glance over at the FactoryWidgets screen on the lab PC and if they see something that needs attention, such as when an analog orb goes from green to red, they can click on the widget to link to get more detail from a number of sources:
- Published Wonderware™ Historian Viewer trends
- Wonderware™ Performance production reports
- Performance or downtime reports
- SPC control charts
- Or click through to any web page
For these reasons, Bacon has configured FactoryWidgets on a desktop PC in the Quality Control lab. The WidgetServer™ is installed on the same server as the plant’s Wonderware Performance, Historian and ActiveFactory reporting systems. The data used to populate the widgets is collected primarily from the Historian, which in turn gets its data from programmable logic controllers (PLCs), Wonderware human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and Wonderware Performance reports. From that central hub, the widgets are initially being served for users in the QC lab, on the production manager’s desktop and at the operations manager’s office, which is located remotely about a mile from the bottling plant.
“We started with quality control because it’s so critical to all our operations, both in terms of production operations and monitoring of environmental issues,” Bacon said. “We only have a half dozen people in the lab, which is the entire department for a factory of our size, and it saves them tremendous amounts of time. They no longer have to physically go out and check statuses such as water process settings or filling stations but can monitor activities on-screen, right on their desktops. They can thus handle other tasks for their manager without worrying about where they are currently with a production run, so they can do a lot more developmental types of activities.
“This new capability frees up at least an hour a day per person, which is equivalent to adding another person to the staff, free of charge – and that’s a wonderful initial return on investment (ROI),” he noted.
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Chris Bacon keeps on top of key indicators such as glycol compressors, temperatures & pressures, cases produced, filler line speed, and boxes produced, right from his desktop.
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Both Bacon and his boss, the operations manager, use widgets to more easily track production on the bottling lines. They’re using multiple widgets – including those for key performance indicators (KPIs), timer, goal, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and analog and discrete orbs – to provide live indicators of data such as production rates, energy usage, order goal attainment, yield, safety and asset utilization. The discrete orbs, for example, are used for monitoring any true-false or on-off values, or for fault conditions, and the ‘goal’ widget shows how many cases are produced against expected targets during production runs.
The widgets are user-configurable in different colors and with customizable text to match the individual user’s needs and they can be set up with on-screen translucency so they aren’t obtrusive while people are doing other work. When target thresholds are reached, however, their behavior is easily noticed.
“It’s easy to spot an orb that changes color from green to red, even from across the room, so our staff knows if something has gone astray,” Bacon said. “All they have to do is hover their mouse over the widget and it’s brought into focus for direct interaction. The widgets are configured so that clicking on them takes people to more detailed information from the HMIs, reports or web pages, and people don’t need to close or minimize other applications. This is especially valuable in areas of the plant that aren’t readily accessible through audible or visual alarms.
“It really makes it easy for us to track virtually any process phase, such as run speed in the filler, proper UV light conditions in the water processing room, or trending the glycol system,” he added. “In addition, being a four-season factory, certain weather conditions can affect our support equipment so it’s important to know if something has faulted or turned off and to monitor the over-use of support equipment during non-peak production times.”
Big Help in Performance Audits
The Nampa facility will soon be using the FactoryWidgets to bolster its results for an annual corporate audit done by Pepsi Cola North America (PCNA) and for third-party audits done by the American Institute of Baking (AIB), which is useful in keeping customers informed about operation quality.
“Audits are becoming more prevalent in our industry and they’re getting more complex, so we think the FactoryWidgets definitely can play a role,” Bacon said. “Auditors always want to see more detail about not only the physical steps in a procedure, but how well you can verify that you’ve fulfilled the process.”
For example, they can now easily show in real time that the rinsing system is indeed activated through bottle stop engagement or disengagement. Having such a good visual presentation for an auditor or a customer helps them understand exactly what’s going on in the factory so they don’t have to be familiar with specific production operations, yet they can get a really quick snapshot of what goes on.
“That simply wasn’t possible when we were only gathering data from a PLC, and while we’ve always had good documentation of our performance, being able to provide instant visualization of specific audit details using these widgets will give us even more credibility as a factory pursuing best practices,” he added.
In addition to facilitating better utilization of equipment assets, the information provided by the desktop widgets has also helped Pepsi Bottling Ventures to make better use of the intellectual capital assets of its personnel. It helps substantiate decisions made by production staff based on their years of experience, providing validation for what previously might have been a “gut” response to a production event.
“Some of our people have been with us for many years and you can’t discount their years of domain expertise,” Bacon noted. “When they encounter a problem, they’re usually very good at resolving it. We’re already finding, however, that the information available with the FactoryWidgets frequently backs up their assumptions and helps determine the best answer to the problem. Often the ultimate solution may be a different path than anyone had considered because the data can support what they’ve already concluded.”
Future Refinements
Pepsi Bottling Venture was a beta site for testing the FactoryWidgets software. They started with just five widgets in the QC lab and a few on Bacon’s desktop but they’re already growing rapidly. They’re now adding another 10 into the central control hub and another five for the operations manager’s platform. Having used the product and recognizing what can be done with it, Bacon feels there are a lot more applications to be monitored.
“Given the very affordable pricing of FactoryWidgets, we can grow this solution at a good pace to add functionality that would not have been possible using other systems,” he said. “One of the major things I’d like to add is remote functions. When FactoryWidgets are available on smart phones we should be able to take this beyond use only inside the plant. I’d like for us to be able to get real time fault conditions or potential stoppage events for key critical components. This would be especially valuable since we’re not a 24x7 operation, so that if something faults while nobody’s here we can respond to it. If we can tie a widget to a PLC that’s wired to that component, we’ll know in real time and be able to come and support it.”
Being the smallest producing plant in the fleet – and about seven times smaller than the flagship plant – the Nampa staff has to be much more cutting edge with what they do, so a lot of the applications and principles they apply with the widgets go beyond just the general beverage industry.
“We really try to use all the technology that we can to give us that lean advantage so that our cost per case is comparable to the larger plants for the volume we generate,” Bacon said. “While we use technology to stay on par with them, there’s also a very good sharing network among the plants. We help each other out and we share what works.”
Long term, the widgets should help Nampa staff add to development of future standard manufacturing principles.
“For a plant as small as ours, these types of tools are invaluable and since we have the right personnel, we’ll have the right types of tools we need to accomplish a lot without having to invest large amounts of capital. And that should help us stay one of the top plants within Pepsi Bottling Ventures,” he concluded.
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