Case study · BR · Food & beverage
Beverage-Bottling Plant
Line OEE 61% → 74% · R$1.9M/yr verified savings
The results
Forklift-route walks and fast fixes for blocked lanes took lost-time injuries from three a year to none.
The CO₂ pressure A3 stopped a pallet a shift of underfilled bottles.
Preventive plans built from real failure history cut unplanned stops on the two worst machines by half.
Finance-verified ledger: recovered syrup, fewer underfills and less peak overtime are the top three lines.
Up from almost none, raised in Portuguese from the line and reviewed every Monday.
“Every summer we lost the same labeller at the worst time. This year we knew it was coming three months early, and we shipped the whole peak.”
The starting point
The plant fills carbonated soft drinks and water in PET for a regional brand owner. Demand doubles between November and February, and every summer the same thing happened: the fillers and labellers that limped through winter broke down at the worst possible moment, and the plant shipped short.
Maintenance ran on a radio channel. A stopped labeller was a shout, a technician walked over, and once it ran again nothing was written down. Nobody could say which machine lost the most hours, so the preventive plan was the manufacturer's manual, followed when there was time.
What changed, step by step
One connected loop: audit, defect, fix, root cause, kaizen, standard, recognition. Open any step to see what it did at this plant.
Step 1 · Audit · 5SSafety and 5S walks on the forklift routes
Supervisors split the plant into 18 zones, with the warehouse and forklift routes first. Weekly walks with a phone found blocked pedestrian lanes and leaking pallet wrap stations that the monthly paper audit had passed for a year.
Step 2 · DefectsA stopped line became a work order, not a shout
Operators report a breakdown in Portuguese, in their own words, with a photo. It arrives as a draft work order with the machine, the likely failure and the priority filled in. The technician starts it from the line, and downtime minutes are recorded when it closes, so the plant finally knows which machine costs the most.
Step 3 · Fix-PlanA preventive plan built from the plant's own history
Three months of work orders showed the labeller on line 2 and the capper on line 3 accounted for half of all unplanned stops. Their preventive plans were rewritten around those failure modes, with the spare parts counted and reordered before the summer peak instead of during it.
Step 4 · Root cause · A3The underfill rejects got a real investigation
Underfilled bottles on line 1 were costing a pallet a shift. The A3 linked them to CO₂ pressure dips at shift change, when two lines started at once on a shared supply. Staggered starts and a pressure alarm closed the case. Underfill rejects fell 52%.
Step 5 · Kaizen · savingsIdeas in Portuguese, ledger in reais
Operators raise improvements from the same phone. Each approved one carries an expected saving and each verified one a finance-checked actual. Twelve months in, the ledger shows R$1.9 million a year, led by recovered syrup, fewer underfills and lower overtime in the peak.
Step 6 · OPL → Skill matrixChangeovers trained from the plant's own photos
The faster flavour changeover became a one-point lesson built from photos of line 2. New starters acknowledge it in their first week, and the skill matrix shows which operators can run a changeover alone before the peak roster is drawn up.
Step 7 · LeaderboardFour lines, one OEE board
Each line's OEE, open work orders and safety findings sit side by side on the daily board. Line crews compete on availability now, and the summer peak shipped in full for the first time in four years. Line OEE averaged 74% over the season, up from 61%.
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