Greenfield Facility Design for Keurig Dr. Pepper

Keurig needed help designing the manufacturing system for a future coffee production facility to be located in Spartanburg, SC. Keurig hired Gray Construction (Gray) to construct the building and assist with certain aspects of the facility design. They also hired a systems integrator, PULSE Integration (Pulse), to develop a detailed design of the material handling systems and implement and manage that design. Both Pulse and Gray contracted SIMCON to validate their designs using simulation modeling and provide recommended alternatives where applicable.

As a result of very large lead times for key components of the Spartanburg facility such as machines and material handling equipment, KDP needed answers to their procurement questions as soon as possible. In order to streamline model development and better meet the stated project objectives within the allotted budget and timeline, the project was divided into several independent models:

• Scheduling model for the packaging lines
• Facility simulation model for the coffee processing area
• Facility simulation model for the raw material warehouse, processing area, and packaging lines
• Light facility simulation model for the palletizing and stretch wrapping cells

Each facility simulation model was driven off of a common production schedule outputted by the packaging line scheduling model. This approach was highly effective because it supported parallel model development, and allowed SIMCON to answer pressing design questions earlier in the project lifecycle. The ultimate goal of the simulation and scheduling project was to determine the system configuration that most effectively supported adherence to the unconstrained packaging line schedule.