Britvic is one of the leading fruit juice and soft drink manufacturers in Europe and the United Kingdom. In a market consuming almost ten billion liters of soft drinks every year, it is a major player. Britvic produces enough cans of soft drinks annually to stretch around the world three times.
Britvic sells almost five million liters of soft drinks daily. They sell over 1.1 billion liters of ready-to-drink soft drinks every year in nearly 400 different shapes, flavors, and sizes to over 250,000 retailers, and has 20 facilities throughout the UK.
Assessments of consumer complaints, research, troubleshooting, testing and development, and monitoring of water quality are carried out in the main laboratory in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. Britvic Soft Drinks has a long history that goes back to Victorian England.
The British Vitamin Products Company was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, and this is where Britvic takes its abbreviated name from. The company started as a home business run from a chemist’s shop, which for a soft drink producer of the time, was not unusual. Soon the company was creating all kinds of originally concocted soft drinks, including mineral waters, tonics, lemonades and non-alcoholic ales.
Today’s business covers a range of leading brands, including R Whites, Tango and the UK franchises for Pepsi and 7UP, as well as the UK’s ninth biggest grocery brand, Robinson’s. Supplementing their core brands is a range of other drinks, including Idris, Aqua Libra, Amé, and Purdey’s, as well as the Britvic brand.
Key challenges
Britvic, which processes over 20,000 samples every year, has been utilizing LabVantage products and services for almost ten years. As the company’s business continues to increase, so do the demands upon its labs, increasing the need to migrate to the inherent scalability of the LabVantage suite of products.
Solution
During their last upgrade, Britvic ran LabVantage and their legacy LIMS simultaneously. The IT department is performing some integration testing, and checking the integrity of the imported database. LabVantage carried out some face-to-face training, in addition to setting up a standalone, one-on-one system for training, testing, and prototyping.
Key advantages
Britvic, which is utilizing LabVantage to enhance the service which it currently supplies to its production and development areas, expects to:
- Replace the microbiology lab’s paper system, massively decreasing the time spent on clerical duties, while supporting UKAS accreditation much better than Britvic’s current system of paper logbooks.
- Track samples, and identify bottlenecks in the workload, which Britvic are unable to do at the moment.
- Be able to email confirmation of sample receipt automatically, instead of having to contact customers by phone.
- Attain more automated, quicker booking, particularly of large batches of samples, using the grids.
- Produce more flexible, effective reports which include images, which will be of particular use in microbial identification, and foreign body analysis.
- Attain improved data tracking. A huge advantage will be the ability to produce ad hoc reports for customers on request easily. This is a service Britvic is unable to provide currently.
- Grow with the lab more easily than the current system.
Looking to the future
Implementing LabVantage in the Chelmsford lab is just the first stage, we’ve still got a long way to go in automating and integrating our other labs, but we’re confident that LabVantage is the company that can help us along the way!
Walker
About LabVantage Solutions
LabVantage Solutions, Inc. is the leading global laboratory informatics provider. Our industry-leading LIMS and ELN solution and world-class services are the result of 35+ years of experience in laboratory informatics. LabVantage offers a comprehensive portfolio of products and services that enable companies to innovate faster in the R&D cycle, improve manufactured product quality, achieve accurate recordkeeping and comply with regulatory requirements.
LabVantage is a highly configurable, web-based LIMS/ELN that powers hundreds of laboratories globally, large and small. Built on a platform that is widely recognized as the best in the industry, LabVantage can support hundreds of concurrent users as well as interface with instruments and other enterprise systems. It is the best choice for industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and consumer goods to molecular diagnostics and bio banking. LabVantage domain experts advise customers on best practices and maximize their ROIs by optimizing LIMS implementation with a rapid and successful deployment.
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