Swire Coca-Cola deployed smart scheduling for manufacturing to solve its most complex labor challenge: automating multi-line, skilled-labor schedules. The GaiaWorks platform helped them meet peak season demand and boost efficiency—all without adding new staff.
Results at a Glance
- Scheduling Time Slashed 97%: Reduced weekly scheduling time for complex multi-line operations from 4-6 hours to just 10 minutes.
- Scaled Labor Sharing: Expanded the strategic “labor sharing” program from just 2 production lines to all 6 lines, unlocking new capacity.
- Achieved 100% Accuracy: Ensured all schedules were 100% compliant with complex skills, rotations, and multi-layered labor rules.
- Met Peak Demand Without New Hires: Increased production flexibility to manage seasonal peaks and boosted overall capacity using the existing skilled workforce.
- Enhanced Employee Development: Enabled a transparent, multi-skilling framework and clear development paths, boosting employee satisfaction.
“Management philosophy and our foundational principles helped us get from 0 to 1. Smart scheduling (with GaiaWorks) helped us get from 1 to 10.”
The Challenge: The New Labor Problem in an Automated Factory
In the age of automation, many assume workforce management problems disappear. Swire Coca-Cola’s advanced facility shows this isn’t true. The facility’s operation relies on a smaller, elite group of highly-skilled technicians, which creates two critical business challenges:
1. Peak Season Demand: The beverage business is highly seasonal. This creates intense peak seasons where the factory must produce more.
2. Skilled Labor Scarcity: The required technicians are difficult to find and train. The factory cannot simply hire temporary staff to meet peak demand.
The strategic answer was internal “labor sharing”—borrowing skilled staff from less-busy lines to support high-demand lines.
This created the real challenge: Extreme Scheduling Complexity.
- Intricate Rules: The factory runs a “3-shift, 2-rotation” system.
- Skill Matching: Planners must match the precise skill and proficiency level for each borrowed employee.
- Layered Constraints: The schedule must obey dozens of prioritized “strong” and “non-strong” rules (e.g., skill limits, hour limits, overtime caps, consecutive rest preferences, etc.).
This complexity made the strategy impossible to scale. Manually creating a schedule for just two lines took 4-6 hours per week and was still not 100% accurate.
The Solution: GaiaWorks’ Smart Scheduling for Manufacturing in Action
Swire Coca-Cola had the right management philosophy but needed a technology engine to execute it. They launched the GaiaWorks Smart Scheduling module to automate their “labor sharing” initiative.
This smart scheduling for manufacturing solution was configured to:
1. Automate All Rules: The system digitized all of Swire Coca-Cola’s complex rules—from “strong” constraints like skill matching to “non-strong” preferences like minimizing disruptions.
2. Optimize Shared Labor: The engine automatically finds the optimal, 100% compliant schedule, identifying which employees to borrow from which lines based on availability, skills, and business priority.
3. Manage Skills: The solution provided a digital “skill tag” management system, giving planners instant visibility into who was qualified for which role.
The Results: Scaling from “Impossible” to “Effortless”
The impact of the GaiaWorks platform was transformative, allowing Swire Coca-Cola to finally scale its core labor strategy.
1. Immediate Efficiency & Accuracy
The 4-6 hour manual scheduling nightmare vanished. The process now takes 10 minutes, and the resulting schedule is 100% accurate and compliant.
2. Strategic Scalability (The “1 to 10” Leap)
With automation, Swire Coca-Cola expanded its “labor sharing” program from the initial 2 lines to all 6 production lines.
3. Capacity & Cost Control
By efficiently sharing its existing skilled workforce, the factory boosted its overall production capacity and met peak seasonal demand without hiring a single new employee.
4. Enhanced Employee Experience
The platform provided a clear, online system for managing skills, allowing employees to pursue new development paths and increasing their satisfaction and retention.
Struggling with complex schedules? See how GaiaWorks’ smart scheduling for manufacturing can automate your operations.