Improving operational efficiency to support growth initiatives—leading to $36 million in revenue

Our Impact

This beverage manufacturer is known to be nimble, positioning them to often be the partner of choice for many suppliers. When customer demand for hard seltzer swelled, this manufacturer worked hard to keep up—but equipment availability and process efficiency issues threatened their ability to meet production targets. 

That’s where West Monroe came in. We partnered with the manufacturer to assess their facilities, identify value creation opportunities, and provide a path forward. Our work laid the foundation for a digital shop floor that would enable data-driven manufacturing operations and position them for continued growth.

The Full Story

The challenge

As the popularity of hard seltzer grew exponentially, the beverage manufacturer received a significant increase in customer requests for product creation. That necessitated increased shop floor and manufacturing efficiency and improved capacity utilization across their four facilities.

This increased demand came with several challenges, which caused the manufacturer to miss production targets. An increase in the number of SKUs put pressure on an already fragile raw materials supply chain. Equipment availability was not optimized, an issue into which they had little insight. Their ERP system was unable to support all their processes, requiring manual work and disparate data.

West Monroe was brought in to assess the manufacturer’s facilities, identify where their issues stemmed from, and help them get back on track.

An undeniably different approach 

West Monroe had already conducted a diligence for this manufacturer, where we uncovered potential value creation opportunities through operational technology (OT). We kept this knowledge at the forefront, assessing their IT and OT systems as an interconnected ecosystem rather than separate entities, to ensure our recommendations were rooted in value creation. 

At West Monroe, we know digital businesses cannot operate to their fullest potential if their teams and tools are operating in silos. Rather than focusing on technology and processes, we focused on value creation and built an integrated strategy to achieve it. It’s how you create a lasting impact.

The resulting strategy included: 

• Gathering data from all available sources, including facility surveys and walkthroughs, as well as interviews with key stakeholders from the c-suite to shop floor operators.
• Compiling pain point lists to identify opportunity areas and both tech and non-tech solutions.
• Conducting a solution architecting exercise to determine how new and existing tech could be leveraged—all solutions were required to be data-driven.
• Recommendation of an updated ERP system to support all processes, cut down on manual work, and enable data-driven decision-making
• Creating a two-year implementation roadmap for increasing organic capacity.

Real Results

The implementation roadmap developed by West Monroe enabled the beverage manufacturer to understand the root of their production issues and make data-driven decisions to fix them. The roadmap will digitize more than six packaging lines  and is projecting a 5-10% labor productivity improvement and an 18% capacity utilization increase, which will lead to $36 million revenue annually over five years.

After being presented with these recommendations, all four facility managers volunteered to be the lighthouse facility—or the first to implement. A new vice president of operations is being brought in to oversee the facilitation of these changes.