Mumbai-headquartered beverages major Bisleri International’s flagship Bisleri Towers in Andheri East holds a vertical production unit setup. This is the first vertical plant in the beverage industry in India with high-speed Kosme bottling lines. In 2017, the company commissioned a unique vertical spiral conveyor by Denipro, which was supplied by WRH Global India. The project was unique given the fact that Bisleri is the first company, not only in India but also globally, to opt for this kind of high-speed vertical conveyor for bottled water. The vertical spiral conveyor has a chain length of 430 meter, the longest in India in the beverage Industry.
Out of the eight floors in the Bisleri Towers, five floors are dedicated for the manufacturing process. Two floors (first and second), out of those five, are dedicated to production while the remaining three (ground, upper basement and lower basement) are for warehouse and raw material storage. The plant has a capacity to produce 1.75 million units comprising all SKUs in the Bisleri portfolio. The Andheri plant is also the first in the Indian beverage industry to use printed shrink sleeves.
“We were posed with the challenge of moving from a bigger land to a smaller area. We had to increase the capacity as well as move into a smaller working space. So, there was no option to go for a vertical plant. But going vertical meant we needed a high-speed conveyor system to match the speed of the bottling lines. We were struggling to find a solution in India which could match the speed of our bottling lines. And then we came across the Denipro system,” says Anjana Ghosh, director – Marketing & Business Development at Bisleri International.
The company looked for an ideal solution for close to two years before coming across the Denipro system. Bisleri approached Denipro and the two parties discussed the issue.
“Denipro did not have a solution that we wanted at hand but within months they came back with one. We visited their manufacturing facilities in Europe and gradually they came up with the system that we are now using. This project is unique not only to us but also for them in a sense that Denipro too had never worked on such a conveyor system for bottled water. Looking back, we think we could not have started our vertical plant without such as system,” Ghosh adds.
Manish Khare, AGM – Production, says that until the project wasn’t commissioned Bisleri was apprehensive about the success.
“We had our doubts but everything turned out great in the end. It is a maintenance-free system as the conveyer does not require any lubrication. Also, power consumption is a tenth of the conventional system,” says Khare.
Having successfully run the vertical conveyor system for almost two years now, Bisleri is confident of duplicating such a system in other plants, especially in metro cities where space is a constraint and vertical plants are needed.
“The successful implementation of the project and a very satisfactory experience during the last two years gives us the confidence to set up a similar multi-layer plant in space-constrained cities of India, especially the metros,” Ghosh says.
