Industry
The customers are demanding greater variety than ever before. The ability to increase the number and mix of products, while prioritizing food safety and security to protect the brand image and value in the market, is the key to be successful in this industry.
Issues
Manufacturing food products would be easy to manage if there were no time limits. Unfortunately short shelf life of ingredients, variable customer requirements, very short order lead times, limited opportunity to store overproduction and existing capacity constraints, forces production to be agile and responsive. The mixture of inflexible capacities, increasing variety in products and packaging, and smaller lead times results in high demands on the planning and scheduling function within the food manufacturing firms.
Solution
With advanced, on-line planning and scheduling tools food manufacturing companies can achieve:
- Reduced lead times by faster change implementations
- Higher throughput by eliminating bottlenecks
- Increased capacity through better resource usage
- Reduced operating costs and lower capital expenditures
- Decreased wastage due to out-of-life ingredients
- Improved efficiencies by sequencing production optimally on set-up times and area preparation requirements
ICRON develops tools and mathematical models that support the planning and scheduling function enabling the adaptation to the changes within the food industries. ICRON solutions make manufacturing more agile, allowing for quick product line changeovers and rapid system conversions for new product introductions and demand changes. The what-if capability that ICRON provides, helps senior management to investigate future strategies like what-if we increase capacity, what-if we sell more, what-if we introduce new products; while the planners day to day can see the effects of last minute order changes, breakdowns, material shortages, seasonal changes, etc