Production scheduling software for corrugated cardboard industry
Main goal of developed software is to produce optimal production scheduling of received orders and to distribute orders on each machine, satisfying all technical and functional criteria.
With optimal production scheduling which is the client’s most important business process, significant savings in resources (paper, working hours…) have been achieved, while increasing profitability at the same time.
On the following figure you can see how one production line in corrugated cardboard industry is looking like (pictured from profile):
Besides achieving overall reduction in paper consumption (main and the most expensive resource) and increased productivity on factory level, there are other benefits of leveraging mathematical algorithms from Operational Research and Management Science in solving the most demanding business problems.
By eliminating all manual work in production scheduling process (like manually producing combinations and distributions of orders), all errors in calculations where also gone.
Another benefit is capability to more precisely match ordered and produced number of cardboard boxes, thus reducing the overall costs.
New orders arrive many times per day. By reducing the time to schedule production from hours to seconds, client can wait till the very last moment to produce production schedule, thus increasing the likelihood that latest orders will also improve final production plan, as optimizer will have more combinations to combine.
Client has successfully created several million of combinations till now.
That proves how implemented technology that are running in production since 2000 is robust.
Many customization have been made as software needs to obey all client’s requirements such as:
- technical characteristics of machines (number of knives, platforms…)
- minimal order length
- paper characteristics (type of paper, quality, width…)
- best business practice logic
In the following figure you can see complexity what developed software needs to solve in case with only 5 orders.
Below you can find several pictures of machines for producing corrugated cardboard to get the feel of complexity of the problem that the software has to solve, where each production line is several hundred meters long.
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