Reduced beverage bottles and wine bottles costs could have significant implications for beverage and wine companies. In extensive work with many other glass bottle manufacturers, our firm has developed more efficient approaches to bottle making, accompanied by substantial cost savings.
Glass bottle production is typical of industrial line operations: There's a mix (silica, soda ash and other compounds), a furnace, a forming/molding process, quality control, packing and shipping. The production lines are supported by a variety of off-line shops.

Assuming the bottle maker has fairly modern furnaces, the greatest opportunities for minimizing costs lie in changing the behavior of management and workers, and in careful management of the forming/molding process.

A major problem in bottle making revolves around the molds and forming machines. Molds wear out, producing major opportunities for quality control. We've learned that the best way to achieve early detection of faulty mold output was to rotate inspectors: The person in that position can quickly become bored. It's simple to move personnel from quality control to other jobs and then back, providing a renewed perspective.

At another factory, the production planning and employee/machine scheduling was managed under a weak Logistics and Supply Department. A new department, Planning and Scheduling, was created and given real power. Prior to this creation, the sales department never fully appreciated the costs associated with its failure to understand factory operations. With the new department came new procedures for communication between Sales and the Planning and Scheduling Department. The resulting efficiencies were enormous. Most cost-savings in bottle manufacturing come from increased output by better scheduling of manpower and machinery.
Solutions for quality control problems also help to reduce costs. Each of our bottle making clients has cut expenses through productivity programs. These savings may appear in the price of glass bottles.