Challenge

Krones-built beverage lines produced world-class output, but the data around them was effectively write-only — making post-batch quality investigation, pasteurizer audit trails and reporting a manual, time-consuming exercise.

Outcome

Itanta's Core Platform now sits on top of five Krones-equipped beverage lines across India's Coca-Cola bottling network — turning every batch into a searchable, exportable record of ingredient dosing, recipe sequence and pasteurizer events.

At a glance

• 5 — Krones-equipped lines
• 501 — Signals logged
• 1-Click — Batch reports (PDF/Excel)

About Krones AG

Krones AG is the world's leading manufacturer of beverage filling and packaging lines. Headquartered in Neutraubing, Germany, Krones designs and delivers complete production lines for soft drinks, juices, water, beer and dairy — covering everything from container production and blending to filling, packaging and material flow management. Krones lines run in virtually every major beverage plant in the world, with a substantial installed base across India's Coca-Cola bottling network.

Headquarters: Neutraubing, Germany · Industry: Food & Beverage Process and Packaging Machinery · Size: Global enterprise

Introduction

Krones AG builds the beverage filling and packaging lines that produce a meaningful share of the world's soft drinks, juices, water, beer and dairy. The company's installed base across India's Coca-Cola bottling network is substantial — and growing.

But a world-class line is only half the story. The PLCs and HMIs at the heart of a Krones line are designed for live operation, not for the questions that come afterwards from the QA lab, the bottler's sustainability team, the franchise auditor or the plant manager preparing for next quarter's review. This case study describes what happens when Itanta's Core Platform is deployed on top of those Krones lines — turning them into observable, reportable, exportable assets for Krones' end customers.

Challenges Faced by Krones

A modern Krones beverage line is a marvel of process engineering. The data layer around it, traditionally, is a different story.

• Batch data was effectively write-only: Live values were visible on the HMI, but historical batches lived inside the controller's local memory — gone by the time a QA query arrived.
• No way to investigate a deviation after the fact: When a batch came in off-spec on Brix or density, there was no replayable record of where in the recipe the deviation crept in. Root-cause was guesswork.
• Pasteurizer audit trail was effectively manual: Every flow-diversion valve event had to be logged for food-safety compliance. The data sat inside the PLC; the audit trail did not.
• Reporting was a person, not a system: Batch reports for QA, bottler audits and the brand owner were assembled by hand from log sheets and PLC printouts — days of engineering time per cycle.
• No common language across stations: Blender, pasteurizer, utilities skid and filler each spoke their own tag dialect. Cross-station questions couldn't be asked, let alone answered.
• World-class line, second-class record: For a brand owner like Coca-Cola — with strict traceability requirements across a multi-bottler network — this gap mattered. Mechanical engineering alone couldn't close it.

Highlights

• Deployed across 5 Krones-equipped beverage lines in India
• 501 unique signals continuously logged into the Itanta historian
• Batch contextualization — every signal value tagged to its batch and recipe
• One-click PDF and Excel batch reports for QA, audit and engineering
• Pasteurizer phase log with flow-diversion-valve state and contact time
• Read-only at the controller — preserves Krones OEM warranty and validation

A repeatable, productized data layer on top of Krones equipment — not a custom integration project at each site.

Background

The line was world-class. The record around it was not.

Krones lines are engineered to extraordinary tolerances. The Contiflow continuous blender doses up to eight ingredients with Brix-controlled accuracy. The juice pasteurizer's flow-diversion valve protects every bottle that leaves the line. The PLCs see everything: every flow rate, every temperature, every valve state, every kilogram of pulp transferred into a tank. For a brand owner like Coca-Cola, with strict quality and traceability requirements across a multi-bottler network, the gap between what the machine sees and what the plant team can later prove mattered.

• Soft drinks, juices, water, beer and dairy production lines
• Contiflow continuous blender with up to 8-ingredient dosing
• Juice pasteurizer with flow-diversion-valve protection
• CIP (Clean-In-Place) skid and utilities metering
• Substantial installed base across India's Coca-Cola bottlers

The framing from Itanta's customer-success team, in the words of the project intake form: "Unable to log batch data from plant." A short sentence for what was really a complete absence of a plant historian wrapped around the Krones equipment.

How Itanta Sits On Top of a Krones Line

Cyclic data logging from the Krones PLCs

Itanta polls every signal of interest from the Krones controllers — process variables from the blender, the pasteurizer, the CIP skid, the utilities meters — at a regular cycle, and writes each value to a time-series historian with a timestamp. The PLC programmes themselves are not modified, which preserves Krones' OEM warranty and validation envelope. Itanta is read-only at the controller level.

Batch contextualization

Raw signals are not enough on their own. Itanta automatically slices the continuous data stream into batches — recognising when a batch starts, which recipe is running, which destination tank is in use, when the batch ends — and tags every signal value with that context. The result: an engineer can ask "show me batch 2509519" and get every relevant signal for that batch, neatly bracketed, instead of having to chase timestamps across raw historian dumps.

Exportable batch reports

On top of the contextualized data, Itanta generates batch reports the plant's QA, audit and engineering teams can pull on demand. Each report covers the full Krones recipe execution — ingredient-level setpoints versus actual transferred volumes, the step-by-step progression through the recipe sequence, the pasteurizer phase log with flow-diversion-valve state and contact time — and exports cleanly to PDF and Excel.

Solutions

How Itanta closes the data gap around a Krones line

• Continuous historian on top of the PLCs: Itanta polls every signal of interest from the Krones controllers at a regular cycle and writes each value to a time-series historian — turning write-only batch data into a permanent, queryable record. Read-only at the controller, OEM warranty preserved.
• Batch contextualization & replay: The continuous data stream is automatically sliced into batches — recipe, destination tank, start/end — so an engineer can pull up any past batch by ID and replay every signal that drove it. Deviations become investigable, not anecdotal.
• One-click batch reports: QA, audit and engineering teams pull on-demand PDF and Excel reports covering ingredient setpoints vs actuals, recipe-step progression and the pasteurizer phase log — including FDV state and contact time. Days of manual assembly collapse to a click.
• Unified data across stations: Blender, pasteurizer, utilities skid and CIP are reconciled into one consistent tag schema. Cross-station questions — the kind that matter most when something goes wrong — can finally be asked and answered.

Krones Dashboards & Batch Reports

Live batch parameters, historical batch lookup, and exportable batch dossiers — covering ingredient-level dosing, recipe-step progression and the pasteurizer phase log.

• SLMG Beverages — Juice Pasteurizer Batch Report: Per-batch production report from the Krones juice pasteurizer at SLMG's Kursi plant. FDV state, flow rates and the full temperature profile across pre-heater, holding coil, cooling coils and product fill — every step of every batch, queryable after the fact.
• LBPL (Ludhiana Beverages) — Flash Pasteurizer Batch Report: Same productized report at Ludhiana Beverages' Hoshiarpur plant. Identical schema, identical export — the report QA needs is one click away regardless of which Krones-equipped bottler produced the batch.
• MBPL (Moon Beverages) — Flash Pasteurizer Production Report: Production-parameter report for Moon Beverages' Raninagar plant, including saver-tank dosing, return-product flow and hot-water flow — the variables that distinguish a clean pasteurization run from a marginal one.
• Enrich Agro Food — Blending Station Batch Report: Ingredient-level dosing record for the Krones blender at Enrich Agro Food's Rohtak plant: every part of the recipe — water, sugar syrup, concentrate parts, pulp components — with start time, end time, set-point and transferred volume per batch.
• Enrich Agro Food — CIP Skid Batch Report: Step-by-step record of each Clean-In-Place cycle on the Enrich line: program, step, forward and return flow, forward and return temperature, return conductivity. The audit trail the cleaning side of the plant never had.

Results

What changed once Itanta sat on top of the Krones lines across India's bottling network.

• Five lines, one playbook — Repeatable across India's Coca-Cola bottling network. The same Itanta data layer now sits on top of Krones-equipped lines at SLMG, LBPL, MBPL and the Enrich blending site — a productized rollout, not a series of one-off integrations.
• Every signal, in context — 501 tags continuously historized and batch-tagged. Process variables from the Krones blender, juice pasteurizer, CIP skid and utilities meters are polled on a fixed cycle, written to a time-series store, and automatically tagged to the batch and recipe they belong to.
• Batch reports on demand — PDF and Excel, in the formats QA already uses. Engineers no longer assemble batch dossiers by hand. A complete record — ingredient-level dosing, recipe-step progression, pasteurizer phase log with flow-diversion-valve state — is one click away.
• OEM-safe by design — Zero changes to Krones PLC programmes. Itanta is read-only at the controller. The Krones validation envelope and OEM warranty stay intact, which is why the same deployment pattern works on both greenfield and brownfield Krones-equipped sites.

Bottom Line

Itanta gives the people who run Krones-built lines the one thing the lines themselves don't — a complete, searchable, exportable record of every batch they ever produced.

• A productized data layer that bolts onto a Krones line the same way each time
• Read-only at the controller — preserves OEM warranty and validation envelope
• Batch-contextualized history replaces guesswork with replayable evidence
• QA, audit and engineering teams pull batch dossiers on demand instead of building them by hand

Run Krones-equipped lines? Let's talk.

See how Itanta's Core Platform turns your existing Krones line into a fully observable, reportable asset — without touching the PLC.