Getting the right beans in the right bags... while keeping the bean-counters happy.

With the varieties of roasts, whole bean versus ground, and diverse flavors and pack sizes, coffee roasters face difficult scheduling challenges. As companies grow and product mix increases it becomes increasingly difficult to maximize output, deliver on-time, and keep costs at a minimum. Effective scheduling to coordinate inventory flow and resources constraints is critical.

• Quickly and easily create updated weekly production and packaging schedules that will satisfy demand and safety stock objectives
• Make sure that the right quantities of the right product are made without running out of bin space
• Keep quality standards high by factoring in degas times into scheduling to avoid losing flavor by unacceptably long delays

Your planning and scheduling system will:

• Create production schedules that take your latest forecast, order, and safety stock requirements into account with the click of a button thus maximizing your order fill rates
• Take your roasting, grinding, degas, flavoring, and packaging capacities and timings into account for an efficient flow of product
• Schedule roast batches that will satisfy various flavor and packaging options in an efficient manner

Key Software Features for Coffee scheduling:

• Continuous flow rules that prevent qualify problems resulting from long delays between production steps
• Inter-resource conveyance constraints that limit resource-to-resource material movement based on physical material handling equipment such as connections between roasters and grinders
• Drag-and-drop scheduling of orders with immediate view of the impact on resulting orders
• Intermediate storage constraints and flags that limit production based on the availability of coffee storage in bins
• Shared-input constraints when one resource feeds multiple downstream resources thus requiring that the secondary resources run compatible products at all points in time - such as requiring that package lines pack the same roast type if fed from the same roaster
• Customizable rules to prevent accidental scheduling of products in unacceptable sequences that lead to cross-contamination such as a rule to run decaf in the planning cycle before caffinated coffee