FIFCO

FIFCO, a 115-year-old Costa Rican enterprise and one of Central America's leading beverage producers — known for Imperial, Pilsen, and Bavaria beers and serving as PepsiCo's official bottler in Costa Rica — had outgrown its manual production management practices. Plant operators handwrote production figures during shifts and later uploaded them to Excel spreadsheets, creating a reporting cycle where a complete picture of line efficiency took up to 1.5 days to assemble. Bottlenecks accumulated undetected across both brewing and packaging lines. In a high-throughput beverage operation where quality consistency and line utilization directly affect margins, decisions were routinely made on data that was already a day stale.

FIFCO partnered with Siemens and local integration specialist Smart to deploy two complementary platforms: Opcenter, a manufacturing execution system managing production orders and work-in-process tracking, and Insights Hub, Siemens' industrial IoT analytics platform for real-time data aggregation and visualization. Smart sensors installed across brewing and packaging lines capture thousands of data points per minute, feeding continuously into Insights Hub dashboards that replaced the manual spreadsheet workflow entirely. Opcenter provides the execution layer — scheduling, work orders, and quality checkpoints — while Insights Hub handles performance analytics and trend monitoring. Together, the platforms transformed the plant floor into a connected digital environment where operators, supervisors, and plant managers all access the same live production data through a single integrated ecosystem.

The headline outcome was the elimination of FIFCO's 1.5-day reporting lag — line efficiency data that once took over a day to compile is now available in real time. The shift from analog to digital operations produced several compounding benefits:

• Efficiency visibility: from up to 1.5 days to real-time, continuously updated
• Bottleneck detection: brewing and packaging line issues surface immediately rather than being discovered after the fact
• Data democratization: operators, supervisors, and management access the same live metrics, eliminating the spreadsheet silos that previously fragmented visibility
• Operational posture: plant staff shifted from reactive troubleshooting to proactive monitoring, acting on current conditions rather than reconstructing past performance

• A 24-hour reporting lag is not just a convenience problem — it means every quality and throughput decision is made on stale data, compounding inefficiencies shift by shift
• Pairing a MES (execution control) with an IoT analytics platform (performance visibility) addresses both layers of the problem; neither alone is sufficient
• Local integration partners with plant-floor expertise are essential to successful sensor deployments in regional manufacturing environments
• Democratizing data access across all levels — not just management dashboards — is what drives operational behavior change
• Targeting data latency is the right first objective in beverage digital transformation before pursuing more advanced optimization initiatives