Production Planning & Scheduling
Food & Beverage
The Food and Beverage Industry faces a set of unique demands that, when combined together, result in an environment that is particularly challenging for planning and scheduling. The Opcenter (formerly Preactor) product range of Advanced Planning and Scheduling software is ideally suited to meet these demands.
Challenges
- Variation in raw materials and demand – Seasonality and reliance on crop yields means that the quantity and quality of raw materials and demand can fluctuate a lot. The planner needs to be in a position to plan for many eventualities and respond easily to the current situation.
- Short shelf life –Perishable materials and produce mean that it is essential to optimize the timing of production to avoid wastage.
- Strong price pressure from customers – In order to remain profitable in the face of pressure to reduce prices, it is necessary to ensure that the production process is running as efficiently as possible.
- Complex quality and packaging requirements – It is often the case that there are complex relationships between the grade of the goods and their suitability for particular customers or product lines.
- Complexity of production process – A mixture of discrete and process production modes can result in complex planning and scheduling requirements, often with contradicting goals for different parts of the process.
Solutions
Opcenter (Preactor) Advanced Planning
Opcenter (formerly Preactor) Advanced Planning is a strategic decision support tool, which combines forecast and long term orders with target stock levels and bucketed resource capacities, to ensure that future demand is met. It does this by creating a master production schedule detailing when and how much of each SKU should be produced in order to satisfy the demand. The software can take in to account constraints such as shelf life and material requirements and can balance the load of production requirements across multiple planning resources.
Opcenter (Preactor) Advanced Scheduling
Opcenter (formerly Preactor) Advanced Scheduling is a finite capacity scheduling tool based on a detailed model of the plant. It takes in to account the actual availability of resources and other constraints, such as tooling and materials, to produce a feasible schedule. From this starting point the software can be used to increase throughput, decrease WIP and inventory, and increase resource utilization.
Food & Beverage Case Studies:
Mars
Twinings
BRASFRIGO
Aunt Bessie’s
Chocoladewerken Gudrun
Highland Spring
Oberto Sausage