Asahi's thirst for efficiency drives technology investment

Japanese drinks company Asahi Beverages manufactures, markets and distributes a broad portfolio of alcohol and non-alcohol beverage products, including soft drinks, juices, waters, sports drinks, energy drinks, beers, spirits, ciders and ready-to-drink mixed drinks. Employing more than 2500 people across sites in Australia and New Zealand, the business faced a challenge common to many large organisations: identifying and propagating best practices.

To be effective, all sites need to know how they are tracking against performance standards. The sites that are failing to meet standards are the ones that need the most help and support from management.

“In order to propagate best practice throughout Asahi Beverages, I need to know how we are tracking against our performance standards. For this we have developed our own KPI methodology that lets us benchmark our performance at all levels,” said Wayne Angus, GM of manufacturing operations.

“The problem we had was that just to calculate and distribute our KPIs every day required tremendous time and resources.”

To streamline this process, Asahi has engaged Operations Feedback Systems (OFS) to deploy the OFS Software Suite across all of its manufacturing facilities in Australia and New Zealand.

“OFS were able to give us our exact in-house KPIs, in real time, which we see as a game changer. It means that the whole organisation, from myself to every operator are looking at how we are going, all the time, on any web browser. Not only did this immediately save us countless hours daily, but we see this as a key enabler on our best practice journey,” said Angus.