Total Cost of Ownership of a Bottling Line — A 10-Year Framework

1. What TCO means

Total cost of ownership is the line's cost over its working life — typically a ten-year horizon — across all categories, not just the purchase price. The price is the visible part; energy, labour, spares, downtime and resale are the rest, and they are set by the line's design. Two lines with the same price can differ by a large margin on the ten-year number — and TCO is the framework that finds it.

The framework is a model, not a marketing story: each category has an input, and both buyer and supplier work from the same inputs.

2. Capital

Capital is the machine, the installation, the freight, the certification and the site works — the package price, depreciated over the line's life. It is the category the comparison usually stops at, and it is the one where the other categories hide: a cheaper line that uses more energy, needs more labour and stops more often is not cheaper. The capital category is the start of the model, not the end.

Compare package prices on the same scope — machine, installation, spares, freight, certification — or the capital comparison is apples to oranges.

3. Energy

Energy follows the design: the compressed air for blowing, the heat for hot-fill and pasteurising, the motors and the plant utilities. The category scales with the design decisions — air recovery, variable drives, heat recovery — and with the local energy price, which makes the same line a different TCO in different regions. The energy data belongs in the proposal, priced at the site's tariff.

The energy category is where the design's quiet choices show: a recovery option that seems optional at purchase is a line item at ten years.

4. Labour

Labour follows automation: the manning table — the crew the line needs per shift — multiplied by the shifts, the wages and the turnover. Automation trades capital for labour, and the trade's direction follows the local wage. The manning table in the proposal is the input; the wage bill is the category — and it is one of the largest in the model.

Turnover is a labour cost too: the training, the lost production and the retraining of a churning crew. The retention plan is a TCO input, not an HR nicety.

5. Spares and downtime

Spares and maintenance are the predictable costs — the wear parts, the service, the starter kit — and downtime is the unpredictable one: the production lost when the line stops, priced at the margin of the product it was making. Reliability is the design's quiet category — a line engineered for uptime costs more at purchase and less at ten years. The model prices both the spares and the downtime the design implies.

Ask for the wear-part list and the expected service intervals with the proposal — they are the spares category's inputs, and they separate a designed line from an assembled one.

6. Resale and disposal

At the end of the horizon, the line has a resale value — or a disposal cost — and the category closes the model. A line from a recognised supplier with a documented history holds more value than an orphan; a line built for one product with no documentation is a disposal cost. The resale assumption is conservative in the model — the point is to close the ten-year number, not to flatter it.

The documentation — drawings, manuals, the FAT and the service records — is the resale value's currency, maintained from day one.

7. Building the model

Build the model with the supplier's inputs: the package price, the energy data, the manning table, the wear-part list and the service intervals — priced at the site's tariffs and the product's margin. The model is the comparison that beats the brochure, and it is a two-page spreadsheet, not a study. Ask each supplier for the same inputs, and the ten-year numbers do the comparing.

The TCO framework applies to every line in the filling machine and combiblock ranges — the categories are the same; only the inputs differ.

Frequently asked questions