Members of the BBI recently visited the modern factory of Britvic Soft Drinks at Beckton, East London. The visit was hosted by Andy West, Factory Manager and proceedings opened with a presentation given by Andy on the scope of the Britvic business and the Becton Factory contribution towards the business.

The Presentation

Andy explained that Britvic is a long established, reputable company whose heritage can be traced back to 1784, via various ownerships and has recently become an independent quoted company.

Britvic is one of the two leading soft drinks businesses in Great Britain and employs approximately 3,000 employees across the UK, located in 7 Factories, 13 Depots & 3 Offices including the Head Office at Chelmsford.

The company has a reputation for innovation, two of the most successful innovations in the past five years being Fruit Shoot and J20, and some famous marketing with three out of the top ten best TV adverts of all time - Tango Slap and St George and R Whites Secret lemonade drinker (Sunday Times & Channel Four).

The Britvic Beckton Factory produces Soft Drinks only in PET Bottles There are four production lines, one producing 500ml at 48,000 bph another producing 1.5ltr x 21,000 bph and a further two lines producing 2ltr at between 16 to 18,000 bph. The site employs 126 people working 24 hours over 5 days and a great deal of investment, over £10 million, has been undertaken over the past five years.

The Tour

On our tour of the plant we were able to see this highly productive factory in operation, the lines are laid out in pairs, back to back, to allow two lines to be run by one line team. There is a modern automated Syrup manufacturing facility and a large Warehouse, capacity 5,000 pallets, in which the palletisers are sited.

Filling Machine Beckton Factory

One of the recent changes was to take the on site bottle blowing Factory Unit back in-house. Andy had explained that this was a successful cost saving approach and to compliment the 3 existing Sidel blowing two more bottle blowing machines had been purchased from SIG Corpoplast. The blowing area is very impressive where we observed the two latest machines, Blomax 14 Series III, installed in January 2005. They have a maximum output capacity of 22,820 bph, i.e. 1,630 bph per mould. They are primarily used to produce 2 litre straight wall bottles for Pepsi, Tango and 7UP, with a bottle weight of 43g. The latest Blomax machines are extremely energy efficient and feature mechanically operated stretching systems that eliminate the need for low-pressure working air (a further energy saving) and provide the best possible stability and repeatability for the stretch blow moulding process. The site is achieving low levels of preform wastage on these machines.

Bottle Blowing Machine Beckton Factory

We also had the opportunity to see the latest equipment (one month old) for loading dollies with PET products. This equipment, supplied by ACMI, has been designed to display palletise 2,0Lt bottles onto plastic beverage trays and to work with “dolly” 800x600 pallets as well as 1200x1000 standard pallets. The machine operates at a speed of 60 units per hour, 1500 per day, stretch wrapped and product is fed direct to this unit at line speed. The bottles are prepared by ACMI’s Pressureless Recycling Layer Preparation system with 48 bottles per layer and are palletised by a 450Kg Fanuc robot complete with a self regulating transfer head. To complete the supply, special pallet conveyors, able to transport dolly pallets with wheels as well as 1200x1000 standards pallets, along with a ROTOFILM 125 high speed stretch wrapper have been provided.

In Conclusion

It was evident during our tour that there was a high level of automation applied through capital investment thus bringing about plant improvements. Andy’s figures suggested to us that this is a well motivated team with line reliability currently at 85% and absence levels at 1.8%, no mean achievement. This aligns with the Beckton focus of delivering key results with self led teams at the same time developing the potential of their employees to attain a high level of capability.

The visit was well attended and gave a much appreciated opportunity for members of the BBI to see a high volume plant and we were rewarded with an interesting presentation and tour of the production lines. On conclusion of the visit John Yates, BBI General Secretary, on behalf of BBI members thanked Andy for a splendid visit and buffet lunch. John also thanked the Keith Walter and Andrew Norbury our tour leaders and congratulated Andy on the results being achieved by a very impressive operation.

Submitted by Brian Gibbs

For Details of SIG Corpoplast equipment please visit http://www.sigcorpoplast.com

For Details of ACMI equipment please visit http://www.acmiuk.co.uk

Brian Gibbs