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Improved Network Enables Higher-Volume Beer Production, Packaging Lines

Grupo Modelo’s Nava Brewery, now owned by Constellation Brands, updated the industrial network to include three separate industrial plant networks for brewing, packaging, and utilities.

Grupo Modelo’s Nava Brewery upped production in a flat market by updating its industrial network
Grupo Modelo’s Nava Brewery upped production in a flat market by updating its industrial network

Longtime importer Constellation Brands Inc. (CBI) began brewing beer itself after purchasing Grupo Modelo’s U.S. distribution rights in 2013 along with its sprawling brewery in Nava, Mexico. Under the terms of its acquisition, brewery operations had to be completely self-sufficient—without any assistance from Grupo Modelo—by June 2016.

“In addition to the deadline, CBI had to expand its annual production capacity from 8.5 million to 20 million hectoliters [225 million to 528 million gallons] in the same timeframe to meet anticipated market growth,” says Chris Renken, vice president of manufacturing systems at CBI.

The plant’s expansion strategy was straightforward but hardly easy. “As we were building, we had to keep the existing brewery running while making tie-ins to critical infrastructure such as water treatment systems, ammonia systems and power generation systems,” Renken says.

Standardizing the network

To achieve all this required a network upgrade for the 885-acre plant as well—the existing network didn’t have the segregation and availability needed.

CBI turned to Siemens Professional Services for Industrial Networks to consult on the design and implementation of the new network design, with the overall objective of optimizing availability and segmentation for the plant.

“Originally, the packaging lines, laser-guided automated transport vehicles and our high-density storage facilities operated on a single, flat Layer 2 network,” Renken says. “Anytime we had a broadcast storm on the network or someone accidentally plugged in a loop, the entire packaging operations would be disrupted, with huge operational impacts to get back online.”

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