Multibeverage plant of the future

Hartwall Ltd is Finland’s leading beverage supplier and part of the Scottish & Newcastle Group. It has a 44 per cent share of the market through its strong portfolio of beers, soft drinks, bottled waters, ciders and other alcoholic beverages and functional drinks; as well as imported wines and spirits through its fully-owned subsidiary Hartwa-Trade.

Hartwall began its operations in 1836 as a producer of mineral waters in Finland’s capital, Helsinki. Today the company manufactures and markets beers, soft drinks and mineral waters as well as other beverages for various occasions. Hartwall is known for its high-quality branded beverages and popular brands include Lapin Kulta and Karjala beers; Hartwall specialty beers and Foster’s, brewed under licence; Upcider ciders; Hartwall Original Gin Long Drink and Otto RTD’s; the soft drinks Hartwall Jaffa and Pepsi; the Hartwall Novelle bottled waters and its own health and energy drinks.

In Lahti, Southern Finland, Hartwall operates a new state-of-the-art, 32-hectare production and logistics centre, which represents Finland’s largest ever capital investment by the food processing industry. This multipurpose plant, producing all beverages from soft drinks to beers, offers capacity and packaging flexibility, fully automated internal logistics, excellent quality assurance and rapid response to any product or packaging changes in the future.

In 2004, Hartwall’s net sales reached €327.8 million and a total volume of 394.3 million litres. Hartwall employs approx. 1,100 staff.

Highly automated, flexible and cost-effective

Competition in the brewing and soft drinks industry calls for new solutions as well as a competitive, versatile range of products that meet consumers’ needs. By centralising production and warehousing functions at Hartwall Lahti, the company is prepared to meet the future challenges facing the beverage industry and has ensured its operational stance and competitiveness in Finland. The Hartwall Lahti Production and Logistics Centre represents a capital investment of €234 million, but its production flexibility is estimated to yield annual savings of up to €17 million.

“Competition in the brewing and soft drinks industry calls for new container and packaging solutions as well as a competitive, versatile range of products that meet consumers’ changing needs. By centralising production and warehousing functions at Hartwall Lahti, the company will achieve greater production flexibility and improved cost-effectiveness. Logistically, Lahti is located at the focal point of operations in this branch nationwide,” says Mika Seitovirta, Hartwall’s managing director, commenting on the background factors for the investment.

“Hartwall Lahti is a highly automated, flexible and cost-effective plant, where particular attention has been paid to the quality of our beverages and to the environmental aspects of our operations. A further focus of our attention has been teamwork and ensuring that our employees have a pleasant working environment,” explains Seitovirta.

In addition to Lahti, Hartwall has production operations in Tornio – the location in northern Finland where Lapin Kulta – the Golden Beer of Lapland – is produced, as well as in Karijoki in Western Finland, where spring water is bottled.

Innovative internal logistics

When planning for the new plant began, Hartwall set the objective of building a world-class beverage plant that would excel in the flexibility of its implementation and functions and make use of highly integrated state-of-the-art automation technology. Owing to the wide range of beverages manufactured at Lahti, no existing model could be replicated, which called for a unique response to the vision. The planning for Hartwall Lahti also embodied the idea of versatility within product groups. In aiming for flexibility and efficiency, the Hartwall Lahti designers opted for a solution that enabled the manufacture of all beverages to be guided from a single control room.

Hartwall guarantees deliveries to customers throughout Finland within 48 hours of receipt of order.

It is exceptional by international standards that Hartwall Lahti is able to meet such demands for versatility, especially considering the company’s complete recycled bottle system that delivers beverages to every corner of a country that is 11 times larger than Belgium.

Hartwall’s Lahti production capacity reaches 350 million litres annually, corresponding to about 40 per cent of the brewing industry’s aggregate capacity in Finland. Apart from beers, the Lahti facility manufactures soft drinks, mineral waters, cider and long drinks, and serves as a storage facility for wines and spirits marketed by Hartwa-Trade. The company produces its own base wine, which is used as a raw material for ciders and long drinks. The new production facility has seven bottling lines and one keg line, in addition to lines for sorting recycled bottles and repackaging products. Krones was the main supplier of equipment in the bottling hall.

Approximately half of the production plant’s floor space comprises storage facilities and related functions. The functions located in this area include:

• Receiving empty goods
• Assembling loads
• Load dispatching

The distance from one end of the building to the other is about half a kilometre.

The logistics centre, which is part of the production plant, has a distribution capacity of up to 400 million litres a year. The internal logistics and order picking are highly automated. Moving beverages along the plant’s internal arteries is handled by automated laser guided vehicles from Rocla and by means of a monorail – a type of conveyor that has demonstrated its suitability in the automotive industry worldwide and offers the advantage of keeping the floor area free. Order picking of customer beverage loads is handled automatically with twelve portal robots supplied by Cimcorp. The largest automated high bay warehouse of its kind in Finland was chosen for Hartwall Lahti because of its overall economy and efficiency. Both the high bay warehouse, monorail conveyor and main internal logistics control system were provided by Siemens Dematic.

The integration of automation and operations control has been raised to a new level at Hartwall Lahti. The entire process – from the start of production until distribution – has been integrated into the company’s operations control system. The MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is an integration tool between the plant-floor level and main IT-systems. The MES-system can be used to create and manage recipes for the automation system as well as to ensure full forward and backward traceability from the raw materials to the bottle and vice versa. This high level of automation with integrated functions is beyond compare with any other brewery. A good indication of the large number of different automation systems is the fact that there are about 50,000 so-called I/O points, or switches, that react to data signals.

Taking environmental matters into account was also a central consideration in designing the new production plant. Right from the start, environmental objectives in accordance with the company’s environmental policy were set for the project. Water and energy consumption were given special consideration in selecting the plant’s equipment and processes. Natural gas is the main source of energy and about 30 per cent of the energy used at the plant is environmentally friendly bio gas.

Hartwall Lahti has received the strictly controlled ISO 14001 certification for its environmental management systems.

A multi-phase construction project

Hartwall purchased the plot of land in 1991 and the first phase of Hartwall Lahti, the production and distribution warehouse, was inaugurated and went into operation in October 1993.

The construction works and equipment installations continued from 1994 to 1999. The additions during these years were a new forklift truck warehouse, an expansion of the high bay warehouse and projects connected with the handling and sorting of empty goods, as well as the repackaging of beverages and order picking. From 2000 to 2003, the production of the factories in Helsinki and Lahti as well as the warehousing and logistics functions throughout the country have been centralised at the new Hartwall Lahti facility.

The production and logistics centre was used in stages as each part of the project was completed and production operations were gradually transferred to Hartwall Lahti. The Hartwall Lahti brewery, bottling operations and logistics functions were up and running during the summer season of 2003. The last part of the building that went into operation was the Visitors and Service Building, completed in Autumn 2003.

The building is approximately half a kilometre from end to end. The new production and logistics centre is 32 hectares in size and has a gross floor area of about 140,000 square metres. The entire complex has a gross floor space equivalent to more than 20 international football fields.

Logistically, Lahti is at the focal point of nationwide operations in this branch. The location offers excellent transport connections with highways running both south-north and east-west and easy rail connections. Also, the quality and supply of the most important raw material – water – is in a class of its own.

The locality also has a supply of skilled manpower owing to a long tradition of brewing in the town.

During the busiest summer days, drinks deliveries amount to almost three and a half million litres. Expressed in terms of one-third litre bottles, this is equivalent to delivering two bottles to every Finn in a 24-hour period. On a single hot summer day, the fleet of vehicles that is reserved for Hartwall’s distribution and transport operations logs a total of about 50,000 kilometres on our roads, or 1.25 times around the globe, as measured at the equator.

Beer gets the gentle touch

One of the basic principles observed in the brand new brewery is minimal processing. In practice this means, among other things, gentler treatment of the beer and the ingredients that go into it. At all stages of manufacture, beer and its raw materials are subjected to the least possible strain.

Thanks to new technology, in the form of a Merlin type Brew house from Steinecker, the operational model yields benefits for the beer and its taste, impacts less on the environment and is overall more economical for the manufacturer.

Examples of minimal processing at Hartwall Lahti are the non-processing of the most important raw material – water – as well as wort boiling and eliminating the pasteurising of ready-brewed beer.

At Hartwall Lahti, beverages are manufactured from completely untreated water, which is supplied directly to the plant by means of its own separate pipeline from a city-owned water pumping station located four kilometres away.

The Merlin brewhouse that was purchased for Hartwall Lahti is Finland’s first. Winner of an international environmental award, the Merlin system has a heat transfer method that is smarter than other systems in reducing the overall thermal load on the wort. This makes it possible to shorten the boiling stage from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

Beer that is processed at the new brewery is also spared the need to go through one extra heat treatment because they are not pasteurised at all, in line with the basic ideology Hartwall has adhered to for years.

One indication of the advantages of an automatedand computer-controlled process is the far-reaching traceability of the raw materials and manufacturing parameters that are used. For example, in working out the origin of the grains of barley that go into a bottle of beer, Hartwall can go back all the way to the field where they originated.

From the standpoint of the beer-loving consumer, the solutions that have been put into effect at Hartwall Lahti mean a beer with a fresh taste and a malt beverage with improved flavour stability. Beer connoisseurs appreciate finesses that are essential for the beer’s taste, such as the way the Merlin brewhouse gives a ten per cent higher yield off bitterness and the advanced manufacturing methods yield a longer-lasting foamy head. In essence, Lahti’s beverage processing plant is a shining example of Europe’s modern manufacturing capabilities and a model for the future of production.