About the Global Top-5 Beverage Producer
The customer is one of the world’s largest beverage producers, with filling and packaging operations across more than 100 facilities, a portfolio of over 200 international, regional, and local brands, and a strong leadership position in Europe.
To maintain this standard despite the complexity of running diverse, high-speed lines across multiple formats and the need to address fragmented issues without scalable solutions, the company sought new ways to improve line performance, utilization, and process reliability - while equipping its teams with better tools to resolve recurring issues faster and drive systematic continuous improvement.
The challenge
The customer’s filling and packaging lines are highly automated, fast-moving systems where operational issues occur daily across many different process steps. Bottles fall and block conveyors and machine infeeds, machines wear out, packaging defects go undetected, and labelling or coding issues create quality and compliance risks.
The challenge is not any single problem - it is the sheer number and variety of problems that can occur across the line. Addressing each issue with a dedicated camera, sensor, or monitoring system is costly, complex, and difficult to scale.
As a result, many process deviations are only discovered after they have already impacted production, leading to scrap, downtime, quality losses, and lost opportunities for root cause analysis.
The customer needed a solution that could:
- Provide a single monitoring platform across the entire production line
- Detect a wide range of process deviations without requiring dedicated systems for each issue
- Alert operators in real time before minor incidents escalate
- Automatically document incidents with video evidence for root cause analysis and continuous improvement
- Scale easily to new production areas and use cases
The solution
The customer deployed Cerrion’s AI Agents across seven critical production areas on both a can and glass bottle line at its European flagship facility. Within the first month, 14 cameras were connected to the platform.
Using standard CCTV cameras supplied by Cerrion, the AI Agents monitor the production lines in real time and detect as well as classify process and quality deviations as they happen.
When an issue occurs - such as fallen bottles upstream of the labeller infeed, a blockage in the bottle washing machine, tipped cans on the packer infeed, open packaging at the Multitopbox, defects at the packer outfeed, flawed crates at the crate inspection point, or label and best-before-date validation failures - the AI Agent responds immediately:
- Operators are alerted in real time via audible alarms to speed up response and resolution time
- High-risk events trigger automated, closed-loop interventions - such as stopping a machine section - to prevent escalation and cut downtime
- Every incident is automatically recorded, including video footage, in Cerrion’s applications
- Operators and line leaders access actionable insights through Cerrion’s shop floor applications, accelerating root cause analysis and continuous improvement.
By deploying Cerrion’s AI Agents platform instead of multiple point solutions, the customer gained a scalable way to monitor, detect, document, and respond to operational issues across the production line. New use cases can be deployed on the same platform and camera infrastructure, allowing the customer to continuously expand coverage without adding operational complexity.
Impact and outcomes
- 90.5 hours of annual downtime eliminated across two production lines
- ~1.3% OEE improvement
- 8x annual ROI
- Decision to expand Cerrion to 25 production areas and cameras across the full plant, adding 11 operational use cases
From pilot to global rollout
Following the initial deployment, the customer achieved measurable improvements in operational efficiency, operator responsiveness, and line reliability. Strong adoption across operators, line leaders, and plant management further validated the value of the platform.
Based on these results, the customer expanded Cerrion from the initial deployment to 25 production areas and cameras across the facility, extending coverage to 11 additional operational use cases.
The next phase focuses on deeper integration with the customer’s ERP, MES, and machine control systems, enabling AI Agents to become an increasingly embedded part of daily operations and automated response workflows.
Building on the success of the flagship deployment, the customer is now preparing a broader rollout across additional European production facilities.
