Product Specification for Premium Liqueurs
About the Customer
The customer is one of the largest players in the Food & Beverage Manufacturing industry with a portfolio of over 50 premium and super premium brands including aperitifs of international renown, bitter liqueurs and spirits. An Italian-born industry leader with products marketed and distributed worldwide, the customer oversees significant production and distribution activity at a variety of production sites, co-packing sites and distribution centers worldwide.
Project Summary
Acquiring many popular beverage brands in the past 2 decades, the customer needed to integrate new products, plants and assets into its operations management systems. Our Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) team of process manufacturing specialists in Italy helped the customer identify Siemens Opcenter Research, Development & Laboratory (RD&L) as the right solution to oversee this massive Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) and Product Specification Management initiative, assisting in the solution’s implementation across the customer’s global sites.
Project Activities
- Conducted on-site Industry 4.0 Assessments to determine the right solution for the customer’s unique operational needs and business processes
- Implemented a LIMS based on Siemens Opcenter for integrated management of product analysis, incoming goods acceptance and production releases
- Simplified and standardized production data collection and validation
- Implemented a custom reporting tool to accelerate information requests from the market and government institutes in real time
- Realized data acquisition and management of plant efficiency and performance data through system integration and instruments connection
- Developed a unified repository for all product specifications, accessible via web to internal stakeholders
Business Drivers
- Standardize contents, collection and validation processes and generated documents
- Manage over 50,000 product specifications
- Improve the performance of machinery and entire production process across sites
- Centralize product management of all specifications
- Reduce time-to-market with flexible, automated and efficient processes
More About the Project
As an industry leader, the customer has always been dedicated to continuous improvement of their products and business processes, including investments in new methodologies and advanced technologies to bring their manufacturing to the next level. Before this project, the customer did not have a standardized approach to Product Specification Management. Manual processes for recording the data of their 50,000 product specifications led to increased operational complexity and time-to-market. To address these challenges, the customer launched an extensive digitalization initiative of their product specification and quality analysis processes, selecting Engineering Industries eXcellence as their strategic implementation partner.
Our team of MOM specialists in Italy visited the customer’s production facilities to collaborate with key stakeholders and conduct Industry 4.0 assessments that would provide insights on what solutions fit best with their current operational and business infrastructure. We identified Siemens Opcenter RD&L as the right solution to develop, configure and manage all product specifications and store all specifications and quality analysis results in a single, controlled data repository.
Implementation of Siemens Opcenter RD&L started in Italy and took approximately six months from installation to go-live. The product specification process began with the collection of quality and quantity information: ingredients and raw materials, intermediates, packaging components and finished products. The Siemens solution standardized and streamlined this data while accelerating responses to product information requests submitted by consumers and regulators.
Today, this information is collected and stored in a unified global repository, accessible via the internet to 140 contributors (specialists who input and approve data) and some 400 readers in different roles who access the web portal to read information and to extract documents and reports. Following the successful rollout in Italy, our team extended the solution to cover the customer’s production and distribution sites across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australia. The solution covers not only all of the customer’s sites around the world, but also co-packers and distribution centers, which receive and distribute finished products.
Engineering’s Advantage
Having worked with this customer before on previous digital transformation initiatives, our Italian team had the process expertise, technical knowledge and strong customer relationships needed to successfully deliver this specification management initiative. As this Italian beverage leader focuses on continuous improvement of their global production processes for the future of Industry 4.0, our specialists around the world are ready to provide support for any challenges they may face and help enable holistic operational excellence.
