Infor WMS manages Saudi Arabian Pepsi bottling plant

  • October 26, 2020
  • Steve Rogerson

Pepsi franchise MenaBev has implemented Infor’s warehouse management system (WMS) at its more than 300,000-square-metre bottling facility in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Underpinning MenaBev’s end-to-end operation, from raw material receipt through production, storage and shipping of finished goods, the WMS should increase automation across the organisation, optimising business processes to boost capacity and support continued growth.

The project was managed by Infor alliance partner SNS, a provider of supply chain consultancy and software implementation.

With eight production lines and thousands of transactions daily between different systems, the facility is said to be the largest operation of its kind in the world. Laser-guided vehicles (LGVs) manage raw materials put-away and replenishment to the lines, while a high bay automated storage and retrieval system with capacity for more than 36,000 pallets receives finished goods from the production lines via elevators and monorails; an automatic truck-loading platform delivers the goods to outbound vehicles.

MenaBev solicited the expertise of SNS consultants in WMS software to complement its offering for this green field project, drawing on the team’s experience in managing such large, complex implementations to ensure the right way to fulfil MenaBev’s needs.

The WMS integrates with seven other systems, including enterprise resource planning, manufacturing execution, laboratory information management and original equipment manufacturer systems, providing real-time integration with monitoring screens to identify any integration problems.

The full production module enables messages to be sent to LGVs to feed lines and notifies the high bay warehouse about finished goods pallets, and a customised yard management system manages dock assignments and access to the facility.

“We can receive raw materials using supplier multi-field barcodes, trigger replenishment to production based on live consumption and load pallets onto trucks without a single paper printed,” said Tamer Salem, automation manager at MenaBev. “Thanks to the new system, we have visibility over all our warehouse processes. We’ve worked very closely with the SNS team to ensure we implement the best solution for our extensive operation. We pride ourselves on our commitment to using state-of-the-art technology in manufacturing and sales and distribution, and this implementation certainly fits that brief. We look forward to this next chapter in our business, readily embracing the benefits this new way of working will bring.”

SNS is a provider of supply chain services whose customers and partners are spread geographically across the globe. It has offices in Dubai, Singapore, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Riyadh and Beirut.

“Facilities of this scale rely on the very best digital capabilities to optimise operations and maximise performance,” said Wael Mabsout, senior manager at SNS. “Infor WMS will integrate with all of MenaBev’s key systems to facilitate end-to-end visibility, which is crucial in generating real-time insights, and enhancing decision-making to support future growth. Our team’s experience in setting up logistics processes of this scale was invaluable in making the right recommendations, especially when it came to integrate with OEMs.”

The plant is one of the largest Pepsi bottling plants in the world. It would take only two hours of production to create a finished-goods pallet stack one kilometre high. The total beverage produced per eight-hours shift is sufficient to fill an Olympic swimming pool, which has the capacity of 2.5 million litres.

New York-based Infor provides mission-critical enterprise applications to 67,000 customers in more than 175 countries. It has 17,000 employees.