Sipping on Success: Smart Manufacturing at Milo's Tea Company

Milo's Tea first opened its doors as a restaurant in 1946, founded on a simple philosophy: use high quality, natural ingredients, fresh brew every tea, and never add colors or preservatives. What began as a small, family-owned business has since grown into a nationally recognized brand, and Milo's sweet tea is consistently the number one selling tea product in the United States.

As demand for Milo's Tea continued to grow, the company's production facility struggled to keep pace. Production, which had traditionally run two shifts a day, five days a week, had shifted to running 24/7, and even that wasn't enough to meet rapidly increasing market demand. Performance roadblocks, siloed systems, and a lack of real-time production visibility made it difficult to identify the best path forward.

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Rather than commit to a costly new production facility, the Milo's Tea team asked a different question: how could they get the most out of their existing assets? Manual data recording was unreliable and often inaccurate, real-time actionable information wasn't available, and the rest of the organization lacked visibility into how manufacturing was performing.

The team at Milo's Tea reached out to Polytron, a Parsec Automation, LLC certified Gold Partner with a track record of successful TrakSYS implementations. Polytron's initial assessment helped architect the project's goals: a unified system for real-time data, e-records, notes, and journals that would empower the Milo's Tea team with data-based decision-making, interdepartmental communication, and room to grow.

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Polytron implemented TrakSYS in a phased approach over a two-year period. Phase one delivered Performance Management (OEE and downtime tracking) across three filling lines with automatic data collection from more than 10 PLCs. Subsequent phases added Sage ERP integration for automated production scheduling, TrakSYS-Powered Smart IIoT Devices to count bottles in areas without PLCs, Historian for process and packaging time-based analysis, and TrakSYS Maintenance Management to replace an outdated, siloed legacy solution. The rollout was later extended to a second factory with all of the same functionality.

Utilizing real-time production data, Milo's Tea recouped the initial project's costs within three months. Out-of-the-box TrakSYS interfaces, dashboards, and reports let plant floor departments rapidly communicate, share knowledge, and resolve production roadblocks, driving an OEE increase from 51% to 79%, a 55% improvement that translated directly into 55% more cases shipped using the same assets and personnel.

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TrakSYS also helped Milo's Tea get a handle on bottle scrap, accounting for scrapped bottles both with and without labels and using those metrics as the scrap number in monthly accounting write-offs.

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The increased output at the first factory allowed Milo's Tea to postpone construction of a second factory by 18 months, all while building a platform for rapid, cost-effective deployment of future requirements.