Technology helps Carlsberg through huge automation project

The project tool ensured effective collaboration across companies and national borders, and it saved a full man-year of project management work.

Carlsberg has successfully completed an enormous automation project at its brewery in Fredericia, Denmark’s largest production and bottling plant for beer and soft drinks. Ten companies from across Europe spent 18 months working together to develop and implement a solution for replacing control systems and re-automating processes at the huge brewery in Jutland, Denmark. The solution encompasses the control of 12,000 valves and pumps.In order to maintain control of this complex work process, Carlsberg called on Projectplace, specialised in cloud-based project and collaboration tools. 

In order to maintain control of this complex work process, Carlsberg called on Projectplace, specialised in cloud-based project and collaboration tools.

It was vital to find a platform that could manage complex collaboration across organisations, external suppliers, partners and national borders.

"There have been up to 40 users working on the project, primarily from Denmark, Germany and Belgium, and we have found that Projectplace has made it easier to collaborate across organisations and national borders. By using Projectplace we have saved a full man-year on the project,” says Kim Christensen, Senior Project Manager at Carlsberg.

After a full 18 months of work the ZORBA project was concluded in spring 2013, and it has been a huge success. The control systems were replaced and the entire processing section of Carlsberg’s production facility in Fredericia re-automated. ZORBA was divided into two stages, and by the end of stage 1 and 2 respectively the systems and the software had been implemented and tested on-site. In both instances over 95 per cent of the software was running optimally in the space of just two months.

"We needed a tool that could give the participants a good overview of the progress of the project, and with the short deadline we needed to be able to get started immediately. The tools from Projectplace were fortunately incredibly easy to get the hang of – we were given just a short introduction, and then we were off,” says Kim Christensen.

"I am extremely proud that we were able to help Carlsberg turn this complex initiative into a huge success”, says Johan Zetterström, CEO at Projectplace.