Consumer & Industrial Products
This beverage manufacturer is known to be nimble, positioning them to often be the partner of choice for many suppliers. When customer demand for hard seltzer swelled, this manufacturer worked hard to keep up—but equipment availability and process efficiency issues threatened their ability to meet production targets.
That’s where West Monroe came in. We partnered with the manufacturer to assess their facilities, identify value creation opportunities, and provide a path forward. Our work laid the foundation for a digital shop floor that would enable data-driven manufacturing operations and position them for continued growth.
projected increase in utilization will lead to $36M revenue annually over 5 years
high-volume lines digitized
projected labor productivity improvement
As the popularity of hard seltzer grew exponentially, the beverage manufacturer received a significant increase in customer requests for product creation. That necessitated increased shop floor and manufacturing efficiency and improved capacity utilization across their four facilities.
This increased demand came with several challenges, which caused the manufacturer to miss production targets. An increase in the number of SKUs put pressure on an already fragile raw materials supply chain. Equipment availability was not optimized, an issue into which they had little insight. Their ERP system was unable to support all their processes, requiring manual work and disparate data.
West Monroe was brought in to assess the manufacturer’s facilities, identify where their issues stemmed from, and help them get back on track.
West Monroe had already conducted a diligence for this manufacturer, where we uncovered potential value creation opportunities through operational technology (OT). We kept this knowledge at the forefront, assessing their IT and OT systems as an interconnected ecosystem rather than separate entities, to ensure our recommendations were rooted in value creation.
At West Monroe, we know digital businesses cannot operate to their fullest potential if their teams and tools are operating in silos. Rather than focusing on technology and processes, we focused on value creation and built an integrated strategy to achieve it. It’s how you create a lasting impact.
The resulting strategy included:
The implementation roadmap developed by West Monroe enabled the beverage manufacturer to understand the root of their production issues and make data-driven decisions to fix them. The roadmap will digitize more than six packaging lines and is projecting a 5-10% labor productivity improvement and an 18% capacity utilization increase, which will lead to $36 million revenue annually over five years.
After being presented with these recommendations, all four facility managers volunteered to be the lighthouse facility—or the first to implement. A new vice president of operations is being brought in to oversee the facilitation of these changes.