Food & Beverage
Opening The Bottlenecks: Targeted Investments Unlock 33% Capacity Increase
33%
Capacity Increase
$30M
Incremental Annual Profit
<$7M
Total Capital Investment
The Challenge
A regional beverage company grew into a nationwide operation with three production facilities and strong year-over-year growth. But that growth sparked a question: when would capacity become a ceiling?
The company recently invested in eliminating a well-known production constraint at their flagship facility and wanted to identify other potential bottlenecks to make smart capital investments. The general belief was that the bottle filling machines, the most capital-intensive equipment, needed upgrading. The question was not whether to invest, but where and how much.
They needed experts willing to walk the production floor, understand the operation from the inside, and pressure-test assumptions before any capital was committed. They brought in Tenzing as their partner for the journey.
The Journey
The Tenzing team conducted plant tours and interviews across the organization, then went back to the shop floor with stopwatches to measure actual process times across the production lines. Every station and every source of slowdown was logged firsthand. Nothing was assumed.
All the data and observations were fed into a factory simulation model built to replicate the full production operation, with all the real-world variation and unpredictability of an actual factory built in. Once validated, the team ran hundreds of simulated production days in sequence, surfacing patterns that would never show up in a single snapshot of data.
The simulation model became the centerpiece of weekly working sessions with the client team. Tenzing walked the client team through findings each week and tested various scenarios together. This collaborative approach gave the results credibility and allowed the client to fully understand the model and eventually own it themselves.
What the simulation model uncovered surprised everyone. The bottle filling machines were not bottlenecks. A single outbound conveyor at the loading dock was choking production, with small everyday slowdowns downstream quietly backing up the entire operation. It looked like a capacity problem, but it was a flow problem.
The Results
33%
Capacity Increase
$30M
Incremental Annual Profit
<$7M
Total Capital Investment
Once the true bottlenecks were identified through direct observation and simulation, Tenzing developed a phased plan of targeted fixes focused initially on the conveyor system and dock operations. Every proposed change was tested in the model before anything was built or bought.
The proposed changes require an estimated $7M or less in capital investments and are projected to increase plant output by 33%, creating a $30M incremental annual profit opportunity. The simulation also showed that the multi-million-dollar filling machine upgrades the company had assumed were necessary would not have moved the needle at all.
Because the Tenzing team worked side by side with the client team from day one, the client did not just walk away with a set of recommendations. They understood the thinking behind every recommendation and were trained to run and maintain the simulation model themselves. This knowledge transfer has enabled the client to run future simulations to pinpoint required capacity investments and prioritize continuous improvement projects.