Beverage bottling plant — downtime reduction

A bottling plant was losing eleven hours a week to electrical stoppages across its filling, capping and packing lines. Every stoppage cascaded: a starter trip on one conveyor starved the line ahead of it and jammed the line behind.

The challenge

Years of piecemeal additions had left the plant with mixed starter types, undocumented wiring and no spares strategy. Faults took hours to trace, and maintenance was purely reactive — the plant only learned about a weak termination when it burned.

What NPE built

✓A consolidated motor control centre replacing scattered legacy starters, fully labelled and documented
✓Soft starters on high-inertia loads to end the belt snaps and mechanical shocks of direct starting
✓Fault annunciation to a line HMI so operators see which device tripped and why, immediately
✓A thermographic survey and torque-check programme catching weak terminations before they fail
✓A recommended spares schedule matched to the installed equipment, held at the plant

The results

40% Downtime reduction

11h to 4h Weekly stoppage

KSh 28M Annual savings

Weekly electrical stoppage time fell from eleven hours to four within the first quarter. Faults that once took a shift to trace are now identified from the HMI in minutes, and the planned-maintenance programme has ended the era of surprise failures. The plant values the recovered capacity at KSh 28M a year.

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