Shashank Iyer (UIN: 672200066)

Operations Intern, Coca-Cola at Niles, Chicago

For my co-op, I accepted the position of an Operations Intern at the

Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Niles, Chicago between 22 nd August and 12th
December.

completed

my

bachelors

degree

in

Mechanical

Engineering and consequently, I had little to no experience in the field

of Industrial/Operations engineering. However, this has changed
drastically since I started working at Coca-Cola. My internship has been
a truly valuable experience and I have had the opportunity to acquire
practical knowledge as well as apply the theoretical knowledge gained
from two semesters of classroom learning.
A production plant is an exciting place for an Industrial Engineering
student like me to work at. This is primarily because of the abundant
opportunities to see first-hand how plants are designed, how processes
are designed, how processes fit together to make the entire
infrastructure work, or how operators influence the efficiency of
production and how managers continually strive to improve quality of
products and processes etc. The Coca-Cola Bottling plant at Niles
concerns itself with the production and bottling of 125 Coca-Cola
products, including carbonated drinks, juices and sports drinks
packaged to meet a wide variety of customer demands. The processes
can be broadly categorized into production or batching, and bottling.

Shashank Iyer (UIN: 672200066)

Operations Intern, Coca-Cola at Niles, Chicago

In the batching process, the concentrate for the product (which is

produced as per a specific formula in a separate production plant;
located in Baltimore for the mid-west region) is mixed with water and
sugar and stored in several tanks of ten thousand gallon capacity. The
plant is capable of producing two broad types of products hot fill and
cold fill. Hot fill products are non-carbonated (juices, sport drinks etc)
and hence are usually treated by pasteurization to kill bacteria and
other microorganisms. Cold fill products are carbonated, which usually
serves the purpose of killing bacteria as well as making the drink fizzy.
The bottling process is distributed across 5 different production lines, 3
of which are for hot fill products and 2 for cold fill. To sum up the entire
process, once a beverage is batched, it is fed to a designated
production

line

where

machine

called

the

filler

fills

empty

bottles/cans. The empty bottles/cans are extracted from the warehouse

through overhead conveyors which serve a dual purpose of air rinsing
the containers during transportation. Once filled, the bottles/cans pass
through warmers

(for cold fill) and coolers (for hot fill)

and

subsequently to the labelers and packers where the bottles are labeled
and packaged respectively. Finally, the packages enter the palletizing
area where palletizer machines pack a programmed number of cases
into each pallet and shrink wrap it for distribution.

Shashank Iyer (UIN: 672200066)

Operations Intern, Coca-Cola at Niles, Chicago

While understanding the nitty-gritty aspects of these processes has

been fascinating, the most exciting part of my internship has been to
actually see this in action and being involved in improving a
preexisting process which forms the crux of the project I worked on
as an intern.
As an intern in the Operations Excellence department, I was involved in
projects aimed at improving process quality. Naturally, no production
process is completely perfect. There are always areas within a process
that are lacking and therefore lead to monetary losses. The role of the
Operational Excellence team is to pinpoint such losses and spearhead
projects aimed at eliminating these losses through problem solving.
Organizations generally rely on six-sigma quality control tools to
streamline processes and improve quality. However, at the start of my
internship I was tasked with creating Value Stream Maps for the entire
plant tools often used in operations management to chart an entire
process from start to finish in a manner that illustrates the value of the
product and its associated details at each stage in the process. This
allowed me to use my knowledge from IDS-532 Intro to Operations
Management, a course I took in the Spring of 2014. It also acquainted
me with the various processes set up within the plant. Once I was
familiar with the processes, I was tasked with analyzing the bottle
3

Shashank Iyer (UIN: 672200066)

Operations Intern, Coca-Cola at Niles, Chicago

reject rate on one of the production lines. My knowledge of statistical

quality control from the course IE 571 Statistical Quality Control and
Assurance

came

in

handy

as

performed

various

statistical

experiments and collected data pertaining to the reject numbers and

its related causes through FMEA studies.
To conclude, this internship has been a fruitful experience so far. The
single most important take away for me has been to have been able to
practically apply and utilize the theoretical knowledge gained in class.
More importantly, this sort of application has rendered a clearer and a
far more permanent picture of concepts learned in classroom. I have
thoroughly enjoyed this internship and I look forward to the next few
months of co-op at Coca-Cola.