Year 11 and Sixth Form ICT students visited the Coca Cola bottling factory at Enfield on 23 April.  They were given a lively and interesting presentation by Bill Muirhead, the education coordinator, who explained how ICT is central to everything that happens at the factory: from monitoring the sugar and bacterial content of the secret recipe of the Coca Cola to controlling the huge robots that shrink wrap the bottles, stack them on pallets which robotic cranes then move to the top of a huge new £28,000,000 warehouse.  Just in time production depends on ordering raw materials like plastic and cardboard by accurately forecasting the demand for the product, which is done through data captured at point-of-sale terminals in supermarkets.

The students were asked to work in teams to produce a marketing strategy for a soft drink.  They had to think of a slogan, suggest suitable packaging, identify an audience and promote the product.  They then presented their campaigns to each other and to a communications manager who was extremely impressed by the inventiveness of the girls’ ideas and the quality of the presentations.

We then toured the factory, and in preparation had to don high visibility jackets and rather fetching red baseball caps complete with hairnets.  The tour was an amazing experience and presented an opportunity to see ICT controlling operations on a huge scale.  The noise of clattering bottles was deafening, and to see thousands and thousands of bottles being blown up from plastic blobs, rinsed, filled, capped, labelled, shrink wrapped, stacked on pallets, bar coded and moved into the warehouse in under ten minutes per bottle was mind blowing.  Did you know that every bottle has a photograph taken of the position of the cap and if it is the slightest bit loose the bottle is removed?  Did you know that every bottle has a radio wave passed through its neck to check that it is filled to the correct level? 

We were also very interested to learn that Coca Cola is becoming more environmentally friendly by reducing the amount of glass in the bottles and using packaging that is 100% recyclable.

J Jones, Head of ICT