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