Olaitan Ganiu claims packaging automation category at NiTA
The packaging automation and smart manufacturing category at the 2023 Nigeria Technology Awards has been awarded to Olaitan Shakirat Ganiu, a reliability supervisor on the mechanical systems side of Nigerian Breweries Plc, the Heineken-controlled brewer that dominates Nigeria’s beer and malt market. Olaitan received the citation for Most Promising Packaging Automation and Smart Manufacturing Professional […]
The packaging automation and smart manufacturing category at the 2023 Nigeria Technology Awards has been awarded to Olaitan Shakirat Ganiu, a reliability supervisor on the mechanical systems side of Nigerian Breweries Plc, the Heineken-controlled brewer that dominates Nigeria’s beer and malt market.
Olaitan received the citation for Most Promising Packaging Automation and Smart Manufacturing Professional of the Year at the awards gala staged by Beta Media on 9 December, 2023 a ceremony that also profiled Nigerians working across data infrastructure, enterprise software, fintech, and industrial engineering.
Read against the category she entered, her win points to a shift inside Nigeria’s consumer goods factories: a generation of locally trained engineers taking on reliability and automation roles that, for decades, relied heavily on expatriate technical staff and foreign-trained managers.
Olaitan joined Nigerian Breweries in October 2019 and has moved through roles centred on mechanical maintenance, reliability, and packaging-line operations. Between February 2021 and March 2023 she served as Packaging Operational and Mechanical System Supervisor, with oversight of mechanical process control on multiple packaging lines. She then moved into a broader maintenance and reliability remit covering preventive regimes, root-cause analysis, downtime reporting, and continuous improvement projects built on Lean Six Sigma methods.
The case for the recognition rests on measurable ground. A brewery’s packaging operation runs through filling, labelling, crating, and palletising in sequence, each station dependent on the one before it. A fault at any point halts the chain. Engineers able to keep such lines running, and to raise overall equipment effectiveness over time, rank among the most sought-after technical staff in the food, beverage, and fast-moving consumer goods sectors.
Her earliest industrial exposure came at Boulos Enterprises between 2014 and 2015, where, as a quality control analyst, she inspected tricycles and motorcycles coming off the assembly line. A Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering followed from the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, in October 2017, with a grade point average of 3.64 out of 4.0. She built on this through the mechatronics and maintenance technologies programme jointly delivered by Nigerian Breweries and the Industrial Training Fund/NECA in 2019, and holds Health, Safety and Environment certifications to the third level. She has been a graduate member of the International Association of Engineers since 2021.
The NiTA awards, in their present form, are one of the few national platforms devoted to technical professionals outside the more visible startup circuit. The packaging automation and smart manufacturing category, in particular, addresses a segment of Nigeria’s industrial base that rarely features in mainstream coverage, despite contributing a meaningful share of the country’s non-oil output.
For Nigerian Breweries, which has leaned on structured reliability engineering across its breweries, Olaitan ’s recognition attaches a name and a face to a function that normally sits below the corporate communications line. For the polytechnic system, often dismissed in public debate as subordinate to the universities, it reinforces the case that the country’s production floors are, and will increasingly be, staffed from their ranks.