Danone Paperless Factory Showcases Manufacturing Sustainability

This video, featuring Magdalena Soból, The Digital Project Leader at Danone, showcases best practices for driving forms adoption and how Poka supports their paperless journey.

Productivity Enhancements and Environmental Savings at Danone

In 2015, a Danone plant in Boucherville, Canada, began using Poka to improve knowledge sharing and communication in production. Today, Poka is Danone’s standard for factory floor performance support across 30 sites in all divisions. One of those sites is a 727-employee dairy plant in Bierún, Poland.

Sustainability is a core Danone value and one exemplified by the Bierún plant. The company’s “One Planet. One Earth” program aims to reduce water usage, CO2 consumption, and waste. To that end, the site is working towards becoming a paperless factory with the help of Poka digital forms.

It takes 10 litres of water to produce one A4 sheet of paper. Additionally, paper accounts for around 26% of landfill waste, which is expected to double by 2060.

Danone has already moved nearly 300 processes off paper across 11 factories with Poka forms. Since the release of Poka Forms, Danone has been a trailblazer with more than 30,000 form completions to date. In Bierún alone, this will save approximately 40,000 printed sheets of paper annually and avoid hogging valuable floor space to store paper records. Shift leader reports, for example, what previously generated over 100 printed pages each month, are now entirely digital.

Poka is proud to have contributed to Danone Bierún winning the Paperless Factory Award and Certification this year.

As if ditching paper to help the environment wasn’t enough, Danone has also seen improvements in daily routines and productivity since adopting Poka Forms. For example, engaging employees in defect reporting using paper was a struggle. Since moving to digital forms, the company has doubled its defect-handling system engagement.

Magda shares, “We can now go to the iPad and fill Poka forms during Gemba walks and move from whiteboard signatures to digital signatures for CIL checklists. We’ve saved 141 hours per year by going paperless!” Poka sends an instant notification to supervisors on completed processes entered in Forms.

Moreover, the problem-solving forms link directly to calls for help in the Poka app to provide context on troubleshooting issues. Users can easily communicate information such as descriptions, analysis, solutions, and next steps right where it’s needed. Magda shared that they can also use Poka Forms to quickly add all safety audit information directly to the platform without manually inputting information from paper to computers.

Danone expects to further leverage Poka forms by adding new capabilities like conditional logic and scheduling in the coming months. The ultimate goal is to ease the daily routines on the shop floor, ensure procedures are followed consistently and gain greater visibility into production.