Spot has arrived at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) in East Kilbride, Scotland! Avoiding downtime is paramount for manufacturers; CCEP GB is keeping their maintenance and reliability team a step ahead with the latest features in Spot® and Orbit™.


Transcript

Gordon Barclay, Automation Engineer: For CCEP we’re always looking at new technology that will enhance the production, enhance the maintenance and Spot fits right in.

With the inspections that he does and the information, the data that we get back, really helps us for one, reliability, maintenance, basically capturing issues out in the line prior to them becoming a big issue.

It’s paramount, paramount. The costs of the line being down is really high. So we want to try and keep the production going twenty four seven and Spot helps us react to any issues that we might not have foreseen out in the lines.

Brian Smith, Maintenance Manager: We are at CCEP East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow in Scotland. And here at East Kilbride, we have have four lines, two glass and two PET.

We do Cokes, Fanta, Lilt, Sprite, and we also do the Appletiser. So we run glass bottles of 750 to 75, 200mil to 330, and we do PET, which is plastic bottles, from two liter down to 500mil.

They’re mainly serves to the Scottish public and to sort of North England.

Ryan McKenna, Reliability Engineer: We deal with a lot of old machinery, so if some of these inspection tasks are critical or missed, then it can create a breakdown. So waking up in the morning and and find out you’re coming in to a breakdown isn’t the nicest start to your day, so having a Spot there to to carry these out would definitely help us.

Smith: The unplanned breakdown again, you’re then looking at unplanned spend and how do we get the lines back up and running, do we have this perhaps on-site, do we have the skills ready to get that done.

Lewis Deans, Reliability Engineer – PET Lines: We have different frequencies inspections, some of them are daily, some weekly, monthly, and then some of the bigger tasks take three months, twelve months, and our overhaul tasks every year. So our goals are to have predictive maintenance on-site and a lot of what we’ve brought in the last year or two has really improved our maintenance process.

Smith: We’re always looking to try and find new things and how do we do asset care and maintenance more effectively. Correct data allows us to predict things properly and then we do the right maintenance activities based on that. So at the start of the CCP at the Barcelona plant, there was a pilot project done in conjunction with Boston Dynamics and Spot was integrated on-site there. I think he’s been there for about a year and a half, two years. So it was a very successful project and they were looking to expand it across sites. GB, they were looking to use two sites. We were very keen to get involved in it as we see condition monitoring as a key part of our maintenance strategy and we’ve seen Spot as being a real good addition to that.

Deans: When we’re doing inspections, we’re doing some condition monitoring on our gearboxes, then thermal imaging checks on electrical panels to try to predict the maintenance.

Spot’s going be taking inspections round about site every hour, every day, repeating them more so than a person could do themselves. So we’re going get a lot more inspection points, lot more data, and we’re going to get to the problem faster.

It’s going to allow us to plan effectively what we want to look at.

Smith: We use ultrasonic, thermographics on our motors and gearboxes, and some mechanical vibration as well. So we’ve picked out inspection routes. We’ve got about three hundred inspection routes across all four lanes, and we’re starting to gather data from that.

Barclay: We can then create a baseline from that information and then we can see if it goes above forty five degrees, fifty degrees, we can then flag an alert. So at the moment with the information we’re getting back, it’s still slightly early days that we have to create a baseline so we can then rule out that what is the norm for the inspections that we do.

Daily, we will look at Orbit, which is a software that controls Spot. We’ll look at the missions that Spot has done and the inspections. If there is any that are out with the baseline that we’ve established, then we will raise that for a job to be looked at for the reliability engineer.

Deans: Spot’s found a couple of air leaks round about site so far that we’ve been able to input in our maintenance system and have our engineers go and inspect to find out the root cause and resolve. Probably just focusing our technicians on the line on some more important tasks for them so their hours on-site are really defined about the daily weekly tasks that they’ve got to do and they’re doing them alongside running the line and doing the fine tweaks on the line to make that line run better.

If they’ve got more hours to do that then they’re certainly going to be a better performing production line.

Barclay: Spot does visual along with that. There’s AI-related visual inspection. So for example, fire extinguisher: We’ll take a photo of where the extinguisher should be and ask a basic AI question. “Is there a fire extinguisher visible?”

The answer is obviously yes or no. The boards as well for lotto. If there’s any missing padlocks, he can set an alert and trigger why is there a padlock missing. It can also inspect digital meters level of lubrication tanks through AI.

Smith: The impact we’ve seen with Spot, basically from some of the data we’ve picked up, we’ve already found some remedial actions we’ve followed up with. So again, a cost saving, we’ve prevented the issues developing. I think the amount of data points we are getting, amount of data we’re collecting, for somebody, for manpower to take that up would be quite a big ask. That then frees our engineers and technicians up to do sort of value added work elsewhere as well, and it’s now allowing us to focus on some more critical assets.

We knew about Spot, but until we have them on-site and start to see what it can do for you, then you start to understand the potential, where you can add to them. As I say, are looking at different plant areas, different areas that you can add on, some of the AI stuff that you can pick up gauge reading and everything like that.

So there’s a lot of potential there that we have to see long term impact that is exciting.

Barclay: East Kilbride’s been here sixty two years and it’s developed into the the site it is at the moment, which I’m so glad to be part of. I think the future is bright here at East Kilbride.

For me, it’s going to transform East Kilbride.