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May 2015 WINES&VINES 67 PACKAGING T he boss of one of the world's most advanced wine bottling facilities says there's nothing better than success based on teamwork. Danni Casey, site operations manager for the Wolf Blass Packaging Centre, says her competitive nature helps drive her to look at every process and work out how to improve it. The state-of-the-art packaging facility, surrounded by vineyard in the Barossa Valley of South Australia, was built in 2005 at a cost of about $120 million (all figures in Aus- tralian dollars), employs about 200 people, has multiple bottling lines capable of filling 24,000 bottles per hour, label- ing lines capable of 26,000 bottles per hour and a 22,000-pal- let storage facility operated by nine robotic cranes. "We are very, very lucky to have all this technology, and it has all been put together so well," Casey said. But despite the giant scale of the operation, the staff's focus on "con- tinuing improvement" means even the smallest operations are scrutinized. A change to the way the facility carries out torque tests of screwcaps is just one example. The test actu- ally destroys the cap, which means both bottle and cap are destined to be recycled. The test used to be conducted on bottles that already had been filled and sealed, until some- one realized they were wasting 16 full bottles of wine every two hours. Now the tests are carried out on empty bottles, and thousands of liters of wine are saved each year. "We have consistently driven our costs per case down," Casey said. "When I first started here as a line manager in 2008, the average change-over time on a line from one product to another was 90 minutes. It's now 35 minutes. "The whole business has changed as well. We are now bottling wine to order, rather than filling up whole sheds of certain products. We do a lot smaller runs and have more SKUs (stock keeping units)." Challenging new labels Wolf Blass is a unit of Treasury Wine Estates, and the bottling and labeling lines are often presented with new packaging ideas from other Treasury brands that require adaptations to both the process and the equipment. Examples include new labels for Wynns, with a wrap-around for The Gables Cabernet Shiraz; and Pepperjack, with a spiral wrap-around for the Graded Collection (shown at left). Matt Sitters, the facility's packaging capability and de- velopment coordinator, said The Gables wraparound label first arrived in August 2012, and it took several hours of trials to get the application perfect. It's another team exer- cise with everyone from the capability coordinator, line manager, labeling machine operator and the electrician involved. Pepper jack's wrap around label differenti ates the Graded Collec tion. Continual Improvement at Packaging Facility The real treasure is in the people, says manager of 24,000-bottle-per hour Wolf Blass operation in the Barossa Valley of South Australia By Nathan Gogoll KEY POINTS The operations manager of a state-of-the-art bottling facility in Australia, Danni Casey, describes her approach to continuous improvement. New labels with wrap-around designs presented special challenges and required label application trials and feedback to the marketing department. Casey runs an open management and monitoring program to provide transparency and accountability.