Sidel supplies bottling lines and software to factory

The new plant Grupo Modelo built in Piedras Negras, in Mexico's Coahuila state near the Texas border has a 66,000 cans per hour canning line, three 144,000 bottles per hour bottling lines, 10 million hectolitres a year and 37 robots.

This is the result of a 20 years partnership between Grupo Modelo and the Sidel Group, as technicians and engineers of the two companies worked on the project for about three years.

Piedras Negras has an automatic warehouse (supplied by System Logistics), Sidel's bottling lines and the automatic trolleys with LGV laser guides (built by Elettric80).

The brain integrating logistics upstream and downstream of the bottling lines is the PLAS (Production & Logistic Automated System) software developed by Sidel to permit dialogue between the bottling line, the warehouse, the automatic trolleys and the company's ERP system.

It has also created a particularly compact layout, significantly decreasing the need for conveyor belts as compared to a conventional solution and bringing important benefits in terms of reduction of maintenance costs and electricity consumption.