Solving Assembly Line Bottling Blues

The Challenge

How did we help a bottling plant resolve an issue related to timing that disrupted the continuous flow of filling their customer’s containers with the customer’s product, and eliminate spillage and waste?

The Solution

The client was a bottling plant that serviced many customers with various sizes and shapes of bottles. These containers were filled on an assembly line, where the time each container took to fill with the product being bottled at the moment was based on adjusting the timing based on the size of the container and also how quickly the particular liquid flowed into the container. The plant was experiencing disruption in the timing of each bottle moving through the filling process. This resulted in excess spillage and waste.

Several experts in the plant has adjusted computers and used personal observation to determine and solve the cause of the problem, yet it continued. The process of constant observation was both time consuming and hard to stay focused on. This Civicom solution was the use of Front Row, which positioned a computer with a wide angle webcam zeroing in on the spot where the problem seemed to occur. Rather than a person standing at the site and continuously observing, the camera recorded the activity including several instances when the timing went off skew and the problem occurred.

Our client made video clips of the problem occurrences using Civicom’s Glide Central curation tools, then strung these together in a storyboard to show the plant management. A group of bottling experts from the plant assembled in a conference room to review the video segments. By looking closely at the repeating pattern of the problem, the plant was able to pinpoint the issue and isolate it to a mechanical problem and not a computer problem in the timing mechanism. The result was the problem was able to be resolved.