Monitoring Machine Performance to Improve Product Delivery - The Coca-Cola Company

Background

Telemetry Ltd uses RTMS systems to supply affordable technology that remotely monitors any type of kitchen or food related equipment in real time.

Telemetry has been working with Coca-Cola since 2018 to help them monitor soft drink quality, identify equipment performance issues and drive efficiencies in their soft drinks systems.

In 2004, Coca-Cola introduced the Quality Maintenance Programme (QMP) in McDonald’s UK restaurants. QMP ensured every restaurant received a bi-annual visit by an engineering company to check on the health of the entire soft drinks system. This manually recorded data is recorded in the RTMS-QMOST system, securely hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This process has been successful in helping to improve and maintain the quality of Coca-Cola products. However, remote monitoring capability has facilitated a completely new approach to the management of the servicing, maintenance and management of soft drink quality in McDonald’s UK restaurants.

Remote Monitoring Solution

Telemetry are installing LoRa based devices, designed and developed by RTMS. RTMS uses AWS to securely store the data, which can be interrogated to help develop trends to identify areas of underperformance, generate operational efficiencies and to automate fault diagnosis.

The wireless sensor system spans the soft drinks system in over 120 restaurants and monitors:

• Ambient temperature in the equipment room
• Carbonated water temperatures
• Ice bath temperatures
• Water flows through filtration systems
• Equipment power usage, at individual equipment level, providing total power consumption

The various sensors gather data which is transmitted back to AWS via wireless gateways. The data is stored for historical reporting and analysis. Sensors can be retrofitted to any equipment, regardless of age or manufacturer.

Alerts are triggered if the data reports an out of tolerance result. Reporting screens have been designed to allow retrieval of and display of data in a clear graphical format. Data can also be exported to a PDF or CSV report.

The Gateways are running AWS Greengrass to collect and analyse the data before transmission via Amazon Kinesis Data Streams back to the AWS web based platform. AWS is used from end-to-end as it provides a reliable and scalable cloud based platform.

Headline Results

Remote Monitoring Benefits

• Real time reporting; 24/7
• Visibility of the entire soft drinks system at peak volume
• Enables environmental impact assessment of water and power usage
• Immediate alert of equipment failure / data out of tolerance enables a faster fix
• Equipment performance data allows servicing to be proactive and reduce downtime
• Sight of whether Quality Critical issues are fixed and when
• Removes link between Quality Critical issues and the bi-annual QMP visit – issues are spotted / fixed at any time
• Engineers are only sent to sites that need them
• Engineers arrive at site with the correct replacement part

Outcomes and Improvements

The data has been revelatory and has enabled the introduction of a new Intelligent Quality (IQ) score to assess quality in a way that’s more representative and accurate than any previous measure.

The remote monitoring system has demonstrated that the drinks system is working correctly in fewer restaurants than expected. Across the rest of the estate that have the system, the data has highlighted where soft drink equipment installations are not delivering soft drinks to the correct quality standard, has highlighted incorrect installations, problematic plumbing, and water wastage. These problems were previously unseen by the QMP process.

Additionally, as the sensors track equipment and utility usage over time, they generate a picture of:

• Utility usage and cost
• Equipment performance at rest vs under pressure
• Seasonal impacts (ie. the impact of higher ambient temperatures)
• Constant monitoring of the quality of the beverage being served

All of these factors are being used to create a cost/benefit analysis for each restaurant regarding equipment replacements, filter system upgrades and utility usage.

As retailers work towards Net Zero environmental impact targets, the monitoring system and the data it provides will become more important in highlighting areas of possible and potential improvement.