New Belgium Brewing has halved its downtime and saved $400,000 annually using Schneider Electric’s Wonderware MES Performance software.

The software also helped the third largest craft brewer in the US increase the efficiency of its packaging line by 30 percent, which allowed it to extend its packaging capacity to about 1.3 million barrels each year.

New Belgium Brewing says it was looking to improve production efficiency while maintaining “green and lean” processes. New Belgium’s management team realized they were producing 150,000 cases of beer each week on lines that were capable of producing 294,000. Scheduled and unscheduled downtime was causing packaging time to be lost.

To address these issues, the company, with technical assistance from Apex Manufacturing Solutions, implemented a system using Wonderware manufacturing execution system software from Schneider Electric. The software tracks and records the bottling process automatically and also facilitates shift changes by providing new workers with data on the performance of the previous shift. Additionally, the system integrated with the brewery’s existing Wonderware System Platform and Wonderware HMI software.

The combined systems improved operators’ ability to maintain packaging production schedules and manage materials supply chain during the brewing process, New Belgium Brewing says.

Earlier this year New Belgium Brewing along with Diageo, the Coca-Cola Company, AB InBev and other members of the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER) published a document that establishes a common framework for greenhouse gas emissions reporting — an industry first, member company Heineken says.