Nestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest food company in the world with products including baby food, bottled water, breakfast cereals, confectionery, pet foods, and snacks. Twenty-nine of Nestlé's brands have annual sales of close to €1 billion including Nespresso, Nescafé, Kit Kat, Smarties, Nesquik, Stouffer's, Vittel, and Maggi.
Across the globe, Nestlé has 447 factories, operates in 189 countries, employing around 339,000 people. One of the brands that sit under the Nestlé portfolio is Italian natural mineral water brand Sanpellegrino. Back in 2018, the company announced it would invest around €70 million in Acqua Panna to establish it globally as the premium still water brand of the Nestlé Group. The three-year project involved restructuring the company's Scarperia and San Pietro production sites in Italy to increase output and efficiency.
The project began in early 2019 with modifications in the production line and was due to be completed towards the end of 2021. The ambitious project also includes the architectural redesign of the factory and surrounding site. The masterplan for the re-design focuses on increasing production efficiency, expanding product availability and improving logistic flows.
For the Nestlé team, one of their main scopes for the factory logistic improvement project involved building a replacement modular logistic office with new factory gates, a dedicated pedestrian path, related road improvements and demolition of the old logistics office. The construction timescales for the Acqua Panna project team were tight – beginning on-site construction in December 2020 and completing in June 2021. The team had six months to execute their construction project schedule to budget whilst also dealing with restrictions and other factors that the global Covid-19 pandemic caused throughout 2020 and into 2021.
The Acqua Panna project team’s scope had a clear mandate: they needed to reduce issues on site, minimise rework, limit additional time requirements and avoid incurring additional project costs whilst ensuring that quality, safety, project coordination and tasks assignments were not compromised. The team wanted to ensure they improved their project coordination and management to successfully deliver to time and budget.
Increasing the predictability of the project activities and outcomes by improving project management and project control activities was an area that Wojciech Pawlowski, E2E Project Management and Jesús Ríos, Project Engineering Manager for Nestlé needed to prioritise from the outset of the project. “During the pre-construction phase of our project, we identified a number of areas where we needed to be more efficient when it came to delivery such as reducing constructability issues, minimising the number of rework items, improving the management of our workers on site through better task assignation and improving communication between project team members,” says Jesús Ríos. “We knew that technology could help us achieve all these things through better project document management practices, a common data environment and utilising digital workflows.”
The Acqua Panna project team began by implementing Autodesk Construction Cloud’s BIM 360 Build platform for better project collaboration. This solution is construction management software for site and field execution as well as project management that empowers teams to seamlessly collaborate and deliver construction projects on time and on budget. Autodesk Docs is an integral part of this platform which is a cloud-based common data environment that provides document management and control to the entire project team.
“We needed to ensure the team were engaged quickly, but effectively, to use the tools. It was important to train relevant people, get them familiar with the solution and be aware how best to integrate the technology into the overall project management process,” says Jesús Ríos. “We partnered with Autodesk’s customer success teams to do this in a short space of time which was invaluable for the project team.”
To set themselves up for success, the Acqua Panna team integrated BIM 360 Build in combination with Autodesk Docs in their project execution processes. They also set up digital workflows when it came to issues management, engineering design review and issues management for field construction. “Although the tools are very intuitive; clarifying open questions and supporting the initial steps on the tool was really important,” says Jesús. “Our project team were able to meet with Business Information Modelling (BIM) experts to provide the best introduction and provide valuable guidance on the technology,” affirms Jesús.
When it comes to measuring the success of the project, the expectations and goals of the Aqua Panna project team were exceeded. Jesús reflects: “BIM 360 Build helped us to achieve our goals successfully. We benefited from much better control of the project and gained valuable insight to better guide on site resources, minimise issues and reduce the need for rework.” Communication and collaboration between project team members improved as all project collaborators could access key documentation at anytime, anywhere as needed. “Using Autodesk’s Construction Cloud meant that transparency improved between all relevant departments and the management teams. The project data was kept up-to-date and stored in one system which helped to reduce email traffic and ultimately save time,” says Jesús.
Overall the factory project for Aqua Panna resulted in time-saving at project setup of 40% and time-saving at project management by 25%. The team were able to reduce issues before start-up phase by 60%. The technology ensured that when construction started on site, clashes and issues were already detected. This resulted in the team saving 75% of project time traditionally spent on issues handling and documentation. Not only did the project save valuable time that could be focused on critical project milestones, but Aqua Panna have also been able to deliver on their sustainability goals. Working with digital workflows resulted in the team saving on printing output by 50% which is in line with their ambitions to reach net zero by 2030. Combined with the reduced issues, rework and waste within the project delivery the team have also been able to deliver a more sustainable factory for Nestlé and the community for years to come.
“Looking to the future, we’re keen to expand our use of Autodesk’s Construction Cloud solutions on other estate projects across Nestle. We will implement BIM 360 Build on our San Pellegrino factory project which will help to improve the project’s productivity and support our teams to collaborate more seamlessly internally and externally,” says Jesús. When it comes to Nestlé's estates portfolio, using cloud-based solutions to deliver better outcomes without compromising on quality is a key area of focus as the company expands its brand portfolio and the operations needed to deliver this.
Content supported by Thomas Nagel, Customer Outcome Executive, Autodesk
