Unilever Bestfoods Belgium’s production plant for Lipton tea has been operational since 1987 and is located in Brussels. During the past 15 years, production has increased from 350 million teabags a year to more than 3 billion, with a foreseen production of 3.3 billion for 2003.  

A quick 360° look says it all; this site is standardized on FlexLink! Jean-Pierre Bouckaert, Initial Control Manager of the Lipton plant, confirms our first impression. He explains that over the years, as production steadily expanded, conveying has become a very important part of the process. Basically the complete process, from packaging the teabags all the way to the palletizing area, has been solved with FlexLink. 

Perfectly running system 
As production runs 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, high reliability is important. There is no time or space for disturbances or breakdowns and there is virtually no time for maintenance. The only option is a perfectly running system. 

Continuous improvement 
Lipton Brussels strongly believes in the Japanese TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) management program. They use it to strive for continuous improvement and to minimize each type of loss, which can be anything from machine breakdown to production waste, to human related issues. Authorized System Builder Createch Engineering regularly checks the system in order to give sound advice and to minimize odds for unforeseen breakdowns. ”Their local support is very important”, says Jean-Pierre Bouckaert. ”If all our machines ran as smoothly as FlexLink’s, we would be truly happy!”