June 26, 2023

Leveraging the printing plant production scheduling

The effort of lithography employees in scheduling was reduced

Leveraging the printing plant production scheduling

At a glance

Challenge

Technological advances and rising client expectations have driven industry companies to seek process improvements for greater efficiency. Our client, a global leader in consumer goods packaging, sought to standardize and optimize its manual, time-intensive, and non-standard lithography scheduling process. As the company’s main production bottleneck due to high setup times, this critical area required an optimal and fast scheduling solution capable of supporting what-if analyses to enhance decision-making.

Solution

A Decision Support System (DSS) was developed to enhance lithography performance. The process began with analyzing and defining requirements, identifying constraints, setting KPIs for scenario validation, and building a flexible framework to toggle features. Next, mathematical models were designed to optimize machine allocation and scheduling in the lithography process. The DSS integrates data from client databases and allows employee input to prioritize specific orders, ultimately generating an optimized production sequence for all machines.

Results

The implemented solution successfully standardized the lithography scheduling process, making it faster and more efficient while enabling what-if analysis to reassess decisions and trade-offs. The system reduced the scheduling effort for employees, giving them more time to evaluate scenarios and simulate impacts. As a result, throughput increased by 2% in printing and 8.1% in varnishing compared to 2015, when the system was first adopted.

Challenge

Technological advances and rising client expectations have driven industry companies to seek process improvements for greater efficiency. Our client, a global leader in consumer goods packaging, sought to standardize and optimize its manual, time-intensive, and non-standard lithography scheduling process. As the company’s main production bottleneck due to high setup times, this critical area required an optimal and fast scheduling solution capable of supporting what-if analyses to enhance decision-making.

Approach

Solution

A Decision Support System (DSS) was developed to enhance lithography performance. The process began with analyzing and defining requirements, identifying constraints, setting KPIs for scenario validation, and building a flexible framework to toggle features. Next, mathematical models were designed to optimize machine allocation and scheduling in the lithography process. The DSS integrates data from client databases and allows employee input to prioritize specific orders, ultimately generating an optimized production sequence for all machines.

Results

The implemented solution successfully standardized the lithography scheduling process, making it faster and more efficient while enabling what-if analysis to reassess decisions and trade-offs. The system reduced the scheduling effort for employees, giving them more time to evaluate scenarios and simulate impacts. As a result, throughput increased by 2% in printing and 8.1% in varnishing compared to 2015, when the system was first adopted.

Our
AI-generated
summary

Our AI-generated summary

Our AI-generated summary

Technological advances and clients’ expectations have led industry companies to look for improvements in their processes so they can produce faster and better with the same resources.

Our client, a leading global company in consumer goods packaging, felt the need to standardize and optimize a manual, time-consuming, suboptimal, and non-standard scheduling process: its lithography scheduling process.

Being the main bottleneck of the company, it’s a critical area, due to the high setup times required by the production process.

Our AI-generated summary

Our AI-generated summary

The chosen methodology was to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) that would help the company to improve its lithography performance.

The first step was to analyze and specify process requirements, find process restraints, set KPI’s for scenario validation, and create a sufficiently generic framework in order to enable/disable certain features.

Secondly, mathematical models were created to optimize the allocation and scheduling of all machines in the lithography.

The DSS receives information from our client databases and allows lithography employees to give their inputs by forcing some orders to be executed. The output of the DSS is the sequence of production for all machines.

The designed solution meets our client’s ambition to standardize the process, making it fast and optimal. It also allows what-if analysis, re-evaluating some decisions and their trade-offs.

The main goal was to help this FMCG company to schedule its orders optimally, fast, and allow what-if analysis.

The effort of lithography employees in scheduling was reduced, allowing them to have more time to evaluate different hypothesis and simulate their impacts.

The throughput obtained in 2017 was 2% (printing) and 8,1% (varnishing) higher than the throughput in 2015 when the system started to be used.

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