With several sites in the UK, Britvic manufactures some of the UK’s best-known and well-loved soft drinks brands including Pepsi, Tango, 7Up, Fruit Shoot and J2O. The Manufacturer Editor Joe Bush paid a visit to the company’s Rugby facility to find out more.
Britvic has been on a rapid continuous improvement journey since the start of the decade which has seen an 18% increase in production capacity, over £160m of new machinery deployed across all sites and a complete refurbishment of its National Distribution Centre (NDC) which features a fully automated high bay warehouse. The Rugby site now features nine production lines, five of which are canning lines, plus an ultra-clean, zero preservative aseptic line.
In addition, the manufacturer has also sought to enhance its sustainability credentials with an £8m heat recovery system, a 160 acre solar farm which is providing 75% of the energy the company was purchasing from the grid, and new water pumps to control pressure and reduce consumption.
In response to general consumer trends, the vast majority of Britvic’s portfolio is sugar-free and the company has also invested significantly in reducing its packaging usage. Globally, 86.9% of the portfolio is low or no calorie, with this figure rising to 96.6% of the GB portfolio.
Supply chain strategy
Britvic operates a triple bottom line principle of people, planet, performance, which deals with profitability, the company’s impact on the world around us and its role with people and local communities.
With regards to performance, Britvic manufacture the vast majority of its products in-house as that’s where the company see it can add real value, whether that’s in the creation of liquids, the quality of products or the sheer scale of volume. “In order to achieve this infrastructure becomes really important and we’ve invested heavily in this area,” said Nigel Paine, Britvic’s Supply Chain Director.
“From 2015 to 2020 we implemented our Business Capability Programme (BCP). The company went public and took the decision to invest £250m into the infrastructure of our GB supply chain. And at the time, we also consolidated our manufacturing footprint along the spine of the country; as well as Rugby, we have a site in Beckton in East London and in Leeds, and we put in ten new production lines across those sites.”
Nigel explained that one unforeseen factor was that the company’s growth since that initial investment has been far greater than first predicted, meaning that on completion, Britvic had actually outgrown the huge footprint that it had just put in. As such, since then Nigel and his team have been on the aforementioned continuous improvement journey.
A key part of this was a focus on emissions reduction, and with help from a grant from The Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (IETF), a heat recovery system is now operational at the Beckton site. This is now storing all the heat generated during production meaning the site is very close to becoming a net zero facility – which will be Britvic’s first in the UK.
A priority on people
Within its GB operations, Britvic has over 1,000 people working within its supply chain, from forklift drivers to data scientists. A significant investment in automation has also had a huge impact on the company’s productivity, as Nigel added: “While the number of people continues to increase as we grow the scale of our business, the employee level is growing at a slower rate than our volume. So, our productivity per employee is increasing as we grow, and that’s due to technology.”
Britvic’s investment in its digital programme across all its lines ensures that employees can look at performance wherever they are and instantly see if there’s an issue. This means that people aren’t required to be on the shop floor to merely stare at production units. “One thing that strikes people when they’re on our shop floor is how few people there are actually running the big machines and systems,” Nigel added.
Britvic is aiming to halve emissions by 2025, and key to this is the company’s Healthier People, Healthier Planet strategy. Britvic’s people-first approach includes further investment into the local community and in education, and work is currently being carried out with different network groups, particularly on topics such as mental health and autism.
“Wellbeing initiatives are key,” added Paramjeet Pahdi, Director of Operations at Britvic in Rugby. “This site is a 24/7 operation and we run 362 days a year. The 400 people we have on-site rotate on a shift pattern, and so wellbeing is really important to us.
“We’ve started to introduce Mental Health First Aiders and we’re working with an initiative called Night Club where we have looked at how we can best take care of night shift workers. We have analysed sleep patterns, looked at diet, working conditions etc. This has enabled us to really hone in on making sure that disruption is minimal when it comes to shift patterns.”
The focus for Britvic when it comes to people goes well beyond the here and now and the company is currently asking itself what the operator/engineer of the future looks like. Over 50% of the company’s engineers come from its apprenticeship scheme, providing a healthy pipeline of future talent. The company’s engineering graduate scheme is also working closely with data analytics to be able to help identify specific opportunities in the future.
“As part of the digital factory operator of the future we’ve also started to introduce digital apprenticeships,” added Paramjeet. “We’ve partnered with a company called Multiverse which has given us a real opportunity to pick up on how data works, what AI really means for us and how can we use analytics.
“We’ve doubled the capacity of the Rugby site within four years, but it isn’t just about growth through infrastructure. We’ve also had incredible growth through people capability, continuous improvement and our engineering expertise, so we’re a real success story in that way. And the capacity that we generate means that we are one of the top five beverage output sites within Europe.”
3 stages of digital transformation
Part of Britvic’s growth plan and continuous improvement strategy incorporates a three-part digital transformation plan. The first is focused around reduction of energy and water use using effective digital methods of metering, and deploying data to identify opportunities to improve.
This also gives the company an insight into patterns and trends. The next phase will be putting all of that data in the cloud, which will enable the company to be more predictive around energy and water usage.
A second performance-related piece has seen Britvic deploy Lineview on the shop floor to enhance OEE performance. Equally, this is starting to become a method of working which is providing a vision of a typical work day which is leading to greater levels of standardisation.
The third and final piece is around the journey to predictive maintenance, centred around condition-based monitoring. Paramjeet continued: “This involves sensors being placed on some of our critical machines, which will give us a signal or pre-warning of a vibration or temperature change for example. This will enable us to make a change before a failure occurs. It will also save us money by not having to change pieces of kit unnecessarily.”
Balancing growth and sustainability
For any business that is going through a period of rapid growth, it would be natural to assume that as production and volumes increase, so too will emissions and carbon footprint. However, Nigel stressed that this is by no means the case, and in fact, for Britvic, the two go hand-in-hand.
While there may have been a steep learning curve for many companies a few years ago, the fact that electricity is now decarbonising at quite a rapid rate has helped enormously.
“The more that the National Grid puts into solar and wind farms, the more the grid becomes decarbonised,” added Nigel. “In addition, companies like us are investing privately into power purchasing agreements in solar farms etc.
“If you look at our global footprint, we use non-mineral gas solutions in Brazil for example, and have biomass fuels in our boilers. The UK hasn’t gone that far yet but that’s why we’ve tried heat pump solutions at our Becton facility.
“And, here in Rugby, even though our volume is increasing we’re balancing that off with efficiency. For example, we’ve moved from a 32 to a 54 hour cleaning cycle on our lines which has seen a huge uplift in OEE (and this will be increasing from 58 to 72 hours before the end of the year).”
Part of Britvic’s Healthier People, Healthier Planet ethos is focused on how the company manages and reduces its Scope 3 emissions. And while it is making a number of changes within its own supply chain, Nigel stressed that collaboration is key.
Britvic works closely with its suppliers to understand the environmental and social footprint of collective activities. Solutions are found through collaboration to drive efficient use of natural resources, and thereby, reducing carbon emissions throughout the value chain.
This includes encouraging suppliers to sign up to sustainability platforms such as Sedex and EcoVadis and supply measurable feedback on their progress.
“We are all determined to reduce and eventually eradicate carbon emissions,” Nigel added. “To accelerate this effort, I am very keen on sharing best practices across both our suppliers and customers. Through collaboration, we can all help each other accelerate the reduction in emissions. We’re actually seeing carbon reducing on a glide path that we’ve chosen regardless of the growth that we’ve been through.”
Helping water fall
Last year Britvic embarked on a project with Rugby Girls School, in partnership with the Engineering Development Trust, to help build partnerships in the town and give something back to the community.
The tie up with this particular school also helps combat the lack of women that are getting involved in engineering and establish engagement and drive with that population.
The project centred around a real-world problem that Britvic was trying to solve; namely its water consumption. As a business Britvic currently runs at around 1.6 litres of water consumed per litre of finished product. The company uses water in the end product for dilution etc, but also for cleaning lines and for use at hand washing stations. The company aims to reduce that consumption to 1.4 litres per litre of finished product.
Unsure on how to achieve this, Britvic engaged with the students who came to site to develop an understanding of where water was being used. They then built their own project to establish an effective way of measuring consumption, conducting research into different types of flow metres etc.
The upshot of the research was to focus on three specific areas. The first was around washing. Britvic performs a 45 minute conveyor belt clean each day due to the microbiological activity that can build up as a result of the sugar used in the beverages, which provides food for bacteria.
The second area of focus was the rinsing of the finished cans. When a can is filled, in order to keep the carbon dioxide dissolved inside the beverage, the can has to be kept under pressure. When the can is filled and the filling head is removed, the pressure is equalised, going from around five bar to one bar of pressure. This instantly causes the carbon dioxide which is dissolved in the beverage to come out as bubbles, in the same way as when a can is opened by the consumer. This can force the product out of the can causing it to become dirty. As such, Britvic rinses the cans.
The third and final area of focus was around the amount of lubrication used on the transfer chain in the seamer, which is where the lid is placed onto the can. That lubrication goes onto the floor which then goes into drains. The students determined these three areas as being potentially non-value added uses of water.
They then designed a series of experiments during a two-day course at Birmingham University to see if water consumption could be reduced. These included changing the regularity of the conveyor washing cycle and analysing the bacterial growth rates; and rinsing the cans with varying quantities of water and swabbing them afterwards.
The end result was a series of recommendations that is predicted to save Britvic 34.6 million litres of water a year across four of its five can lines which equates to around 14 Olympic swimming pools and £87,200 pounds worth of financial benefits.
“This project hasn’t just been a benefit for us,” said Adam Barker, Production Unit Manager at Britvic, who also led on the girls school partnership. “We’ve also been able to give back to the community. This is a group of people that probably wouldn’t have been attracted to a manufacturing career before, that are now interested in getting involved.
“You tend to get the same demographic when you go through the regular recruitment process. So, if we want things to change, we need to be part of the process to drive that forward and get people that are underrepresented into the industry.
“Every single one of the students involved has requested that they come to us for work experience and/or internships, and they’ve really started to get a motivation and a desire to be part of manufacturing. As a result we’ll be doing the partnership again next year, and we’ve already got a project ready.”
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