Nestlé Nescafé improves efficiency at its largest coffee plant

Food manufacturer Nestlé is using Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Asset Advisor software to boost efficiency and reduce downtime at its largest coffee production plant. The Nestlé Nescafé Toluca Complex in Mexico City produces over a million jars a day and the company wanted to ensure that it was able to avoid unnecessary and costly downtime.

By moving to the EcoStruxure software, Nestlé has gone from using a reactive system of maintenance to a predictive one. With this reactive method problems were being fixed as they arose, with eight unplanned outages in one year, one of which led to a 14-hour shutdown at a cost of almost $600,000.

With the new software, however, Nestlé has real-time insights into its electrical equipment, which means that engineers can remotely monitor the company’s assets and data analytics can be used to inform service intervals. This means that the company has greater visibility into its operations and thus higher flexibility, resilience and efficiency.

“With a plant as large as Nestlé Nescafé, ensuring reliability of all the electrical systems is a particularly involved task,” said Luis Gilberto López Páez, electricity specialist in Nestlé Toluca Cafés.

“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.”