Lean Management Principles in Bottling Technology

There is more waste involved in the filling of bulk goods than meets the eye. It doesn’t manifest itself in obvious defects, but in the everyday processes that no one questions: in the product changeover, which takes 45 minutes even though the actual switch could be completed in 10 minutes. In the safety margin of 80 grams per bag, which amounts to 40 kilograms of wasted product when 500 bags are handled per day. In the pallet that stands fully packed in front of the loading dock, taking up space because the truck won’t arrive for another three hours.

These losses add up. Product losses due to overfilling, unnecessary cleaning cycles during product changes, wait times at the line, and oversized intermediate storage facilities cost bottling plants five- to six-figure sums every year—sums that do not appear in any single cost item because they are spread across dozens of process steps.

Lean management offers a systematic framework for identifying and eliminating precisely these losses. The approach was developed in the automotive industry, but its principles—identifying waste, maximizing value creation, and continuous improvement—apply wherever a material flow passes through a chain of process steps. A bagging system that processes bulk material from the silo through dosing, filling, and sealing to a pallet-ready unit is one such material flow. This article shows how Lean principles are specifically applied to the value chain of bulk material packaging—from order planning to delivery.

Lean management is a company-wide strategy for the systematic reduction of waste—not only in production, but in all processes along the value chain. Bertagnolli defines its core as follows: Lean focuses on eliminating non-value-adding parts of processes, thereby reducing costs in a sustainable manner. The key difference from traditional cost-cutting: It is not about cutting budgets or reducing staff, but about identifying and eliminating activities for which no customer is willing to pay.

In bulk goods packaging, this affects far more than just the filling process itself. Lean Management asks: Where does waste occur from order acceptance to pallet delivery? This includes production planning—for example, when batch sizes are based not on customer demand but on avoiding setup operations. It includes logistics—when finished pallets are temporarily stored because loading is not synchronized with the bagging cycle. And it includes quality assurance—when redundant inspection steps exist because the process itself is not stable enough to rule out errors from the outset.

Lean Production, on the other hand, focuses on the production process at the packing station: How can the filling process itself become leaner, faster, and error-free? Bertagnolli clearly defines the relationship: Lean Production is the operational implementation of Lean principles on the shop floor—stabilization, flow, rhythm, pull, and perfection—applied to the physical sequence from bag mounting to palletizing. Lean Management provides the strategic framework, while Lean Production delivers the operational implementation of Lean principles at the bagging line.

Bertagnolli uses the original Japanese term "muda" for waste—literally meaning "to toil" or "pointless effort." This meaning captures the essence better than the common translation "waste" because it directs attention to the activity itself: It is not the material that is wasted, but the labor, time, and energy that go into activities for which no customer pays.

In the Lean methodology, all activities are divided into three categories: value-adding—the customer would pay for this. Necessary but not value-adding—the process requires it, but the customer does not pay for it. And waste—it consumes resources without generating any benefit.  

Bertagnolli documents a typical distribution for non-optimized processes in which the time actually spent on value-adding activities accounts for only a fraction of the total effort. In a bagging line, this means: The value-adding activities are filling, dosing, sealing, and palletizing the bag. Everything else—waiting, transporting, cleaning, checking, searching—is either necessary and should be minimized, or wasteful and should be eliminated.

Ohno and Shingo identified seven types of waste, to which Bertagnolli added an eighth: unused employee knowledge. He considers this eighth type to be perhaps the most important, because people are a company’s greatest asset.

Bertagnolli emphasizes that overproduction is the worst form of waste because it leads to all the others: Anyone who bags more than ordered automatically creates inventory, transportation costs, space requirements, and, in the worst case, waste due to aging.  

In a bottling plant, the mechanism is easy to understand—the cause often lies in batch-size logic: Because a product changeover takes 30 or 45 minutes, it is preferable to run a larger batch than necessary in order to spread the setup costs over more bags.  

Bertagnolli describes precisely this fallacy of fixed-cost degression as the fundamental problem: Unit costs decrease mathematically, but only if there is actually a buyer for the quantity produced.

Simply being aware of waste isn't enough—it must be identified and quantified within the specific process. Two tools from the Lean methodology are particularly well-suited for this purpose.

Bertagnolli structures lean production around five interrelated principles: stabilization, flow, rhythm, pull, and perfection. These principles are not abstract—they describe a sequence: first, establish stable processes; then, create flow; next, produce in sync with customer demand; then, manufacture only on demand; and finally, continuously improve. For the value chain of bulk goods packaging, three of these principles can be applied particularly directly.

The pull principle reverses the logic of production: it is not the production order that triggers the bagging process, but rather actual customer demand that drives it. In practice, this means bagging on a per-order basis rather than for stock. No bag is filled unless there is already an order or a call-off for it.

Bertagnolli describes the prerequisite for pull precisely: It only works if changeovers between products are fast enough to run even small batch sizes economically. As long as a product changeover at the bagging line takes 45 minutes, the operation will always tend to run larger batches—that is, push instead of pull, with all the consequences: overproduction, inventory, and tied-up capital. Only when short changeover times enable the pull principle does order-based production become worthwhile, even with frequent product changes. Pull also requires flexible plant planning that can react on a daily basis, rather than rigidly following weekly schedules.

Dennis describes the core principle as "one-piece flow"—the uninterrupted movement of a workpiece through all processing steps. In the bagging process, this translates to "one-bag flow": Each valve bag passes through the stations for bag mounting, filling, dosing, compaction, sealing, weight checking, and palletizing without any intermediate buffers. No bag waits between two stations, and no work-in-progress inventory builds up.

The effect is twofold. First, the throughput time—a Lean KPI in the filling process—decreases: The time from the start of filling to the finished container on the pallet is shortened because waiting times between stations are eliminated. Second, disruptions become immediately visible—if a bag is stuck between sealing and palletizing, this is not a buffer but a signal of a cycle time deviation. Kletti and Schumacher make a similar argument: Excessive inventories between process steps mask the actual problems—poor takt time, unreliable machines, and excessively long setup times. Only when the buffers disappear do the root causes come to light.

Kaizen—literally, “change for the better”—is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process of small, regular improvements. Bertagnolli describes this approach as the antithesis of the Western mindset, in which optimization occurs in large leaps through investment. Kaizen starts where the process stands today and improves it in steps that every operator can implement.

At the bagging line, these are not theoretical exercises: Adjusting the bag storage position at the magazine so that the operator needs one less hand movement. Documenting the dosing parameters after every product change so that the next change to the same product is completed faster. Shortening the cleaning cycle by swapping the order of the work steps. Every single measure saves seconds or minutes—over hundreds of cycles a day, this adds up to measurable capacity.

The starting point for Kaizen on the bagging line is usually workplace organization: 5S as the first Kaizen tool at the filling station creates the foundation for making deviations visible in the first place. Kletti and Schumacher explicitly classify 5S as a prerequisite for all further optimizations—only a clean, standardized workstation makes it clear where the process deviates from its target.

Lean management cannot be implemented as a complete package. Its introduction follows an iterative four-step process that is repeated at every bagging station—regardless of whether it is a vacuum packer for ultrafine powders or an air packer for granules.

Step 1: Identify waste.  

The starting point is always the current state. The value stream analysis captures the entire material flow of the bagging line—from the silo outlet to the pallet—and breaks down each process step into value-added time, necessary non-value-added time, and pure waste. The result is not an abstract diagram, but a quantified roadmap: 14 seconds for filling, 8 seconds for sealing, 35 seconds waiting for the next bag. This is supplemented by a Gemba Walk at the packer—observing the actual process, not the planned one.

Step 2: Define the target state.  

Concrete target KPIs are derived from the current state, not general declarations of intent. For a bagging line, these might be: Reduce setup time from 45 minutes to 15 minutes. Reduce give-away from 80 grams to 30 grams per bag. Reduce the scrap rate due to faulty sealing from 0.8 percent to below 0.1 percent. Each target is measurable, scheduled, and assigned to a process step.

Step 3: Implement measures.  

The tools are tailored to the identified waste. 5S at the filling station if searching and disorganized workstations are the main sources of loss. Standardize cleaning procedures if product changeovers take too long. Automate manual tasks if motion waste is dominant. Each measure addresses exactly one type of waste—not everything at once.

Step 4: Measure results and iterate.  

After implementation, the current state is measured again—against the same KPIs from Step 2. OEE as a benchmark for lean success in the filling process shows whether the measures have actually improved availability, performance, or quality. Operational KPIs for controlling the bagging process—throughput in bags per hour, give-away in grams per bag, setup time in minutes per product change—make progress visible at the shift level. What has achieved the goal is standardized. What has not yet been achieved goes back into the next cycle. Bertagnolli describes this cycle as the core of Kaizen: not improving once and then falling back, but taking the new standard as the starting point for the next iteration.

Beyond the individual improvement cycle, systematic waste reduction acts as a TCO lever: every minute of reduced setup time, every gram of reduced give-away, and every defective bag avoided lowers the plant’s total cost of ownership over its lifecycle—often to an extent that amortizes the cost of implementing Lean within just a few months.

Quellen

Bertagnolli, Frank: Lean Management. Einführung und Vertiefung in die japanische Management-Philosophie. Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden 2018.  

Kletti, Jürgen / Schumacher, Jochen: Die perfekte Produktion. Manufacturing Excellence durch Short Interval Technology (SIT). 2. Auflage, Springer Vieweg, Berlin Heidelberg 2014.

Dennis, Pascal: Lean Production Simplified. 3rd Edition, CRC Press, Boca Raton 2015.