Keep your production resources running the right products, at the right time.

In many ways Food and Beverage production is similar to other industries: products must be produced on time to meet demand, production capacity is limited, raw material purchasing and intermediate production must be coordinated, and there are constraints limiting which products can be made on which equipment. In addition, F&B manufacturing poses a number of unique production scheduling challenges. For example there are spoilage concerns, cross contamination must be avoided, cleanouts can be lengthy, intermediate storage is limited and conveyance equipment constrains material flow paths.

The benefits of effective scheduling in the F&B industry are also unique -- and substantial. Good schedules mean more time producing and less time performing cleanouts - resulting in increased output and higher revenues. Also, risks associated with spoilage and cross contamination are reduced as are the costs of storing products that are produced too early or shipped late. Even transport costs can be reduced by tightly integrating shipment schedules with production.

How do you:

• Quickly and easily create updated weekly production and packaging schedules that will satisfy demand and safety stock objectives
• Create production campaigns that increase production output by minimizing cleanouts
• Ensure that important quality and process constraints are taken into consideration in the planning process to minimize risks such as cross-contamination and spoilage

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
• Provide you visibility of any expected stock-outs where capacity is insufficient, giving you the tools to easily re-plan, make "drag and drop" changes, and consider alternatives in "what-if" scenarios
• Make sure that all constraints in your production process are considered including: equipment capacity and selection, tooling requirements, required sequencing rules, etc.

Key Software Features for Food and Beverage scheduling:

• Ability to model run rates by product by resource
• Continuous flow rules that prevent spoilage between production steps
• Inter-resource conveyance constraints that limit resource-to-resource material movement based on physical material handling equipment
• Drag-and-drop scheduling of orders with immediate view of the impact on resulting inventory
• Intermediate storage constraints that limit production based on the availability of inventory storage in tanks, bins or other containers
• Shared-input constraints when one resource feeds multiple downstream resources thus requiring that the secondary resources run compatible products at all points in time
• Customizable rules to prevent accidental scheduling of products in unacceptable sequences that lead to cross-contamination
• Batching of requirements into efficient campaigns that also take demand timing into consideration