Enterprise Transformation for Arca Continental
About the Customer
Arca Continental is dedicated to the production, distribution and sale of beverage brands owned by The Coca-Cola Company, as well as salty snacks brands from Bokados in Mexico, Inalecsa and Carlisnacks in Ecuador, and WISE and Deep River in the United States. With an outstanding trajectory of more than 96 years and 46 production centers, Arca Continental is the second largest Coca-Cola bottling company in Latin America and one of the most profitable in the world. Through its Coca-Cola franchise, the company serves a population of more than 125 million in northern and western Mexico, as well as Ecuador, Peru, northern Argentina and the southwestern United States.
Project Summary
Arca Continental sought Industry 4.0 solutions as part of their enterprise digital transformation strategy of market disruption and sustained growth. Our Engineering Industries eXcellence team of manufacturing specialists was challenged to build innovative Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architectures for 45 Arca Continental plants of differing processes and sizes and to deliver integrations for existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and other shop floor systems at each site.
Project Activities
- Implemented full-featured MES to cover the entire production process: material and inventory management, order execution integrated with quality control, production planning and scheduling
- Integrated new MES solution to customer’s existing ERP system
- Connected assets to monitor, collect and upload performance data to IoT cloud continuously and in real time
- Integrated manufacturing intelligence solution to cloud to provide accurate and reliable asset performance analytics on factory floor
Business Drivers
- Optimize operations and achieve paperless manufacturing
- Ensure efficiency and alignment between enterprise planning and production execution
- Enable real-time asset performance monitoring and analytics visibility
- Harness power of data coming off shop floor for continuous improvement
- Advance the enterprise digital transformation journey of Arca Continental
More About the Project
Before beginning their digital transformation journey, Arca Continental relied on their ERP system to generate monthly asset performance reports. The management of assets was administered from these results indicators, which naturally caused the organization to take a reactive approach to day-to-day incidents. Additionally, these Key Performance Indicators (KPI) were difficult for stakeholders to access and interpret due to a lack of context and minimal knowledge regarding business rules for operational systems. While Arca Continental faced challenges identifying their pain points, management was also taking more time to make assertive decisions based on the available data, which resulted in room for improvement in overall productivity and cost-efficiency.
Arca Continental selected Engineering Industries eXcellence as the ideal strategic partner to identify the right Asset Performance Management and Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions for implementation across their global production sites. In conjunction with business intelligence, Engineering IndX used available sources of data from the customer’s SAP ERP system to shape a tailored strategy that best aligned with Arca Continental’s business drivers. Collaboration with key stakeholders led our experts to determine that solutions from Siemens’ innovative product portfolio would be the most effective to meet their operational needs, and after approval from the customer, implementation began at the customer’s main site in Mexico.
Leveraging Siemens Opcenter Execution Process (SIMATIC IT UAPI) software, our experts enabled Arca Continental to monitor, control and manage all the activities, resources and works-in-progress across their enterprise during production. Next, our team implemented Siemens MindSphere to monitor the usage and performance of Arca Continental’s assets within their facilities. As a result, plant managers and operators could ensure optimized resource utilization, minimizing the costs of energy and materials, and preventing bottlenecks and quality issues during production. Finally, our specialists leveraged Siemens Opcenter Manufacturing Intelligence (MI) software to integrate different sources of operational data from their ERP systems, for the purpose of deeper analytics, reporting, visual summaries and data sharing between enterprise-level and shop-floor systems. Thanks to the collaboration of our teams in the U.S. and Mexico for this Industry 4.0 initiative, Arca Continental has a new digital ecosystem to revolutionize production data and asset management.
Engineering’s Advantage
As a long-standing partner of Siemens Digital Industries specializing in their digital manufacturing portfolio, as well as an established system integrator in the Industry 4.0 space, Engineering Industries eXcellence was the right strategic partner to help Arca Continental digitalize their asset management and data democratization processes. Our MOM specialists’ technical expertise, industry experience and strong customer relationships allowed us to form a solution strategy that would create a new foundation for operational excellence and reap long-term benefits. We continue to support the customer on their digital transformation journey, enabling them to disrupt the market, ensure sustained growth and face the future of Industry 4.0 with a clear path forward.
