Case Study · Manufacturing Operations
How one of Canada’s leading beverage co-packers replaced clipboards, paper logs, and end-of-day spreadsheets with a real-time digital operations platform, with full ROI in under a year.
< 1 year
Return on investment
30%
of one engineer’s time recovered (was spent on manual data collection)
2–3 hrs/day
eliminated from manual OEE calculations
Established in 1992, Delta Beverages is one of Canada’s leading beverage co-packers, producing 50,000 cases of carbonated, alcoholic, and non-alcoholic beverages in glass and PET bottles every day for global food and beverage leaders.
Over the last decade, Delta invested heavily in world-class filling and packaging equipment. But while the machines kept getting more advanced, the data and processes around them still ran on paper, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. To stay ahead, Delta needed to bring its operational data layer up to the same standard as its production hardware.
Three operational realities were slowing Delta down.
Line operators recorded production and downtime by hand. Supervisors collected paper records from every line, every shift, and re-entered them into spreadsheets to calculate Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). The process was slow, inconsistent, and error-prone.
Delta’s Continuous Improvement engineer spent 2 to 3 hours every day calculating downtime, throughput, and OEE from the previous day’s paper records, just to feed the morning management meeting. That’s 30% of one engineer’s time consumed by data entry instead of process improvement.
Key metrics like asset utilization, asset-specific downtime, changeover trends, and product-level profitability lived in spreadsheets that no one could trust in real time. Capital and resource decisions were being made on stale, fragmented data.
“It takes me 2 to 3 hours every day, sometimes more if there are mistakes that need to be corrected.”
Harman Singh
Continuous Improvement Engineer, Delta Beverages
A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.
Veritechs spent the first weeks of the engagement on the floor, not in slides. We mapped daily process flows alongside Delta’s operators, supervisors, and maintenance technicians, identified the gaps that were costing time and accuracy, and co-designed the system with the people who would use it every day. Front-line feedback shaped every iteration. Training was built into the rollout, not bolted on after.
An integrated Manufacturing Operations System with four core components.
A web-based application replacing manual downtime recording, used by line operators on tablets throughout each shift.
A coordinated suite of three apps powering maintenance and administration workflows.
Ten production dashboards giving leadership real-time and historical insight.
The backbone storing production, downtime, and maintenance data, optimized for real-time analytics.
Delta Beverages saw tangible operational improvements within weeks of go-live, and the project paid for itself in under a year, simply by recovering the 30% of one engineer’s time that had been consumed by manual data work. Today, the system is the operational backbone of Delta’s daily management cadence.
With real-time downtime visibility on the floor, the Delta team now corrects issues as they happen instead of debriefing them the next day.
With asset-usage-based PM triggers and full work-order traceability, maintenance is scheduled when assets actually need it, not on a fixed calendar.
“The results of the Digital Manufacturing Operations System with Veritechs have been outstanding. The project has provided us with increased real-time visibility over performance metrics, significantly improving our ability to monitor and optimize operations. Additionally, adherence to maintenance tasks has improved, reducing downtime and enhancing overall efficiency. The data-driven decision-making capabilities we’ve gained have been invaluable, allowing us to make more informed and strategic choices.”
Andrew Elias
Vice President of Operations, Delta Beverages Inc.
“Our time is now dedicated to solving problems instead of collecting data.”
Delta operations team
“The project delivered a quick return on investment, with substantial savings in administrative labor hours alone.”
Delta operations team
Production-grade Microsoft stack, designed to fit Delta’s existing IT environment, not replace it.
Most B2B operations are sitting on the same problems Delta had: data trapped in paper, decisions waiting on yesterday’s spreadsheets, maintenance scheduled by calendar instead of usage. A two-week Veritechs Diagnostic tells you exactly where to start and what it would cost to fix.