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Ensuring Operational Resiliency at the World’s Largest Soluble Coffee Facility
Nestlé is deploying EcoStruxure Asset Advisor, Schneider Electric’s connected operational resiliency and efficiency platform at the Nescafé plant in Toluca, Mexico City.
With daily production of approximately one million jars of coffee a day, the plant is Nescafé’s – as well as the world’s – largest facility of its type, and key to the success of Nestlé globally. In 2013, the company expanded the plant’s production capacity by 40 per cent by investing approximately US $125 million, making it the largest soluble coffee facility in the world. With the plant responsible for more than one million jars of coffee produced daily, preventing downtime is critical for Nestlé’s operations.
Improving uptime reliability, greater visibility, and operational flexibility
Prior to Asset Advisor, maintenance was reactive. Eight unplanned shortages in one year, including a short-circuit inside an unmonitored section of the main substation that resulted in a 14-hour shutdown, costing the company approximately US $588,000, saw production faltering. As service continuity is central to the production plant, EcoStruxure allowed Nestlé to move to predictive maintenance, letting teams resolve issues proactively to avoid costly disruptions that could cost up to US $52,000 per hour.
Implementing Asset Advisor gave Nestlé real-time visibility into its electrical equipment, allowing engineers to remotely monitor assets. By relying on data analytics to dictate service intervals, the electrical teams at Nestlé can now spend less time reacting to issues and the plant’s equipment spends more time performing optimally.
Frédéric Godemel, Executive Vice President for Power Systems and Services at Schneider Electric, comments: “We’ve been seeing strong Services growth in our business, and we understand the importance of mission-critical systems and how it is non-negotiable for major production operation like the Toluca complex.
“With our EcoStruxture software, we are committed to providing customers like Nescafé greater visibility, increased resilience, and flexibility to improve their operational efficiency without the added costs and strain on the environment, and ultimately seen as the go-to-services expert in critical industries.”
Luis Gilberto López Páez, an energy management specialist with Nestlé Toluca Cafés, adds: “With a plant as large as Nestlé Nescafé, ensuring reliability of all the electrical systems is a particularly involved task.
“Across our operational network, we have been deploying flexible and scalable digital solutions to enhance our responsiveness, and the move to partner Schneider Electric was a natural one – having already collaborated in our production facilities in France and Switzerland.
“Since deployment, EcoStruxure Asset Advisor has allowed us to identify hot spots and attack them before they become a problem – saving us costly downtime, greatly enhancing our ability to respond quickly to changes in demand and ultimately better service our customers and reduce our operational carbon footprint.”
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