Scheduling Solution for a Plastic Compounds Manufacturer

A mid-sized plastic compound manufacturer was spending hours scheduling production each day. Among many other value-added job functions, their scheduler spent hours creating manufacturing orders and reviewing the production schedule on a daily basis. Relying almost entirely on experience and intuition, the scheduler had to account for raw material availability, product inventories, and sequence-dependent changeovers – all while trying to estimate and meet customer delivery dates.

Complicating matters further, the client did not have an industry-standard ERP or MES system. They instead used a customized database program to manage operations, with custom views used for reviewing and updating customer orders and the production schedule. As a result, they did not have extensive data on their production system, and their scheduler needed to create and schedule all orders manually to determine the delivery dates quoted to their customers.

After working extensively with the client to define their challenges and desired outcomes, we proposed a simulation-based scheduling solution.