How Founders Brewing Boosted Efficiency with Smart OEE

In this interview, Patrick Zambon of Mahou USA shares how Founders Brewing Company transformed its operations by implementing a smart manufacturing solution with the help from Engineering Industries eXcellence and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Walk through Founders’ journey from paper-based processes to a digital Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) platform powered by AWS IoT Greengrass and AWS IoT SiteWise. The goal? Reduce inefficiencies, improve decision-making and future-proof operations - all without the hassle of custom code.

Key Benefits

• Efficiency Gains: Live OEE reporting helped reveal inefficiencies that formerly remained hidden due to manual tracking.
• Data-Driven Decision‑Making: Real-time data allows teams to respond immediately to issues, reducing downtime and improving throughput.
• Scalable Smart Factory: The solution lays a foundation for further scalability and advanced analytics in brewing operations.

“Thanks to this project, we’ve been able to eliminate a lot of inefficiencies and waste in our process, allowing our operators to go right to a digital platform.”

- Patrick Zambon, Controls Engineer at Founders Brewing

Full Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Patrick Zambon. I work for Mahou USA and we're at Founders Brewing Company today. I've been in manufacturing for about 20 years now, and in the brewing industry for about 10 years at Founders. Founders has a solid foothold in a United States craft industry with a growing global presence.

About six years ago, Founders was trying to streamline some processes and get rid of inefficiencies, so we decided to utilize the data from the equipment to help make better, informed decisions. The main objective was to have a digital Overall Equipment Efficiency, or OEE, software to remove all the paper off the production floor to help operators, have better data entry and provide our managers with proper data reports.

We partnered with Engineering Industries eXcellence for this project. They were highly recommended as a strategic consultant that would help us in their digital transformation. Engineering Industries eXcellence suggested we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. To help us implement our project with their ease of deployment and flexible software, they would be a great partner. Additionally, AWS offers many features like extracting data from different angles and the ability to review your data from any software platform. We wanted to implement a smart manufacturing solution to help us with a digital OEE platform for a one hundred percent out-of-the-box experience. We didn't want to worry about custom code or having issues with updates later.

The main steps toward this was working with them and the AWS Support team to download AWS’ IoT Greengrass, which is just a lightweight software. It resides on-premise and points to AWS's IoT Sitewise, which is in Amazon's cloud. From there, the smart manufacturing solution tied into Sitewise.

Thanks to this project, we've been able to eliminate a lot of inefficiencies and waste in our processes, allowing our operators to move toward a digital platform. The next step for Founders is to migrate our current historian into AWS’ IoT Sitewise. That will allow smart manufacturing solutions to help us in other areas of our business.

At Founders Brewing, we are committed to quality and innovation. We are confident in our partnerships to achieve this vision!

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