Project development and execution in the context of the brewing manufacturing process.

Gunn, A. and Grobbelaar, A.S.

Abstract
The planning and project management methods used by South African Breweries during the expansion of the Alrode Brewery (near Johannesburg) between 1990 and 1995 are described. Conventionally, such projects tend to be divided into sections based either on technical disciplines (process engineering, electrical engineering, construction of buildings, procurement of materials and equipment, etc.) or on departments within the brewery (brewhouse, fermenting area, packaging hall, etc.), which can lead to a lack of coordination as each section pursues its own goals without sufficient consideration for the needs of the other sections or the project as a whole. The methods described in this paper are intended to prevent such problems arising by ensuring that the planning and management of the entire project is oriented towards the complete brewing process, from raw materials to packaged beer, and that the work of the different disciplines within each section of the project (which corresponds to a stage of the brewing process, such as wort production, fermentation or filtration) is coordinated both with the work of persons in other disciplines in the same process stage section and with the work in the same discipline in the project sections covering the preceding and following stages of the brewing process. In the case of the Alrode project, which increased the brewery's production capacity from 3.9 million to 7.124 million hl/year, the new facilities installed include a set of brewhouse vessels (capacity 1500 hl), forty eight 3000 hl fermenters, a high gravity brewed beer dilution plant, two 600 hl/hour filtration lines with their ancillary equipment, eight 2000 hl bright beer tanks and two bottling lines for 40000 and 60000 bottles/hour, plus CIP systems, automatic process control facilities, boilers for the additional steam required and a refrigeration plant.
Keywords : brewery construction design equipment management planning