Lean and Mean Sweet

PERHAPS the world wouldn't automatically associate chocolate wafers with a country in the Middle East. Nevertheless, for Nestlé, this area of the world has been a traditional market, as Paul Bulcke, Nestlé Chief Executive Officer, mentions in the official factory opening press announcement: "Nestlé has been present in the Middle East for 75 years, bringing meaningful value to society at large by sourcing locally, creating new local employment, offering nutritious products and helping in the further development of the region.
This tradition also became one of the drivers to invest in a $136-million manufacturing facility in Dubai, aiming to serve the Nestlé markets across the region. "By opening our new facility in Dubai -  our regional headquarters -  we will be closer to our consumers in the region and can better adapt our products to their needs and preferences. The Middle East region is a very important part of Nestlé business and our continued commitment and ongoing investments demonstrate our confidence in the region," as cited in the same Nestlé document.

The project requirements

For the plan to produce flow wrapped 2 and 4 finger KitKat, Quantum and Chunky Wafer bars (including multi-packing and cartoning) on two lines at very high output rates of 1,440 and 1,000 products/min in a new, dedicated plant, Nestlé from all the beginning on targeted to implement all new machinery and process in the plant with a lean strategy approach. In other words, it was important to ensure operational efficiency from the first day on.
Bosch Packaging Technology, as one of the suppliers chosen to be part of this huge project, was committed to follow and support this approach in all disciplines of the project.
Therefore, Nestlé's supplier requirements were quite challenging, going from detailed technical specifications for manufacturing of the equipment, including all third party components, up to detailed organisational life cycle planning at a very early stage.
As a consequence, questions on lean start up during the on site commissioning phase, operator training, continuous production support and improvement, as well as spare parts sourcing have been thoroughly discussed and reviewed during the whole manufacturing process. N wonder the communication flow between the Nestlé and Bosch project teams was quite high, enabling the companies to jointly define the criteria for common success for both partners. Following a discussion on training requirements at an early stage with Bosch's dedicated training department, the teams decided to prepare this important launch by investing in intensive operator training, which was performed on an existing installation for the same product in central Europe, even prior to installation of the new machinery in Dubai.
The close joint project work also led to installing an embedded engineer helping with the introduction of the new technology during installation, the Factory Acceptance Test (FAT), on site commissioning and the Site Acceptance Test (SAT), and also later after the Bosch crew had left the site. The advantages of the E-Portal from Bosch spare parts ordering tool was another pillar for successful start up and autonomy in terms of preventive maintenance.

A challenging path to success

The path to common success has not always been smooth, however, and special efforts had to be considered by both teams to run a new, locally sourced film material for multi-pack on the machines, following Nestlé's goals to locally anchor the supply chain for new equipment. For this topic, the overall general good and close cooperation between the project teams contributed toNike Hyperdunk 2017