Integrating demand management, production planning, trim optimisation and logistics planning into a coherent solution

摘要

The particular requirements of the paper industry have traditionally spawned point solutions that address 1. Forecasting and demand management 2. Production planning 3. Trim optimisation 4. Despatch planning The integration of these hitherto disparate solutions, often sourced from different vendors, present significant challenges. With its latest-generation, Greycon is offering a coherent, best-of-breed, industry-specific set of solutions that are integrated with each other. Taking advantage of the latest display capabilities, these tools employ multi-threaded optimisation to tackle previously unsolvable aspects. The planner is assisted by a workbench that can evaluate trade-offs between competing objectives. For example, is there enough trim efficiency gain to shift this order from this mill to another mill, taking into account the additional transportation cost and delay? Similarly, the system can support VMI with automatic generation of optimised block paper machine schedules (trading off grade and grammage switchover costs against customer service / inventory targets). This generation of solutions, which has been under continuous development for many years, is now progressively being adopted by clients. Just in 2017, Greycon expects that incremental capacity close to two million tpa will be scheduled with these tools. A surprising benefit deriving from the advanced optimisation capabilities, is that the optimised paper machine runs are in practice significantly longer than manually created ones, without adverse impact on customer service or inventory levels. These longer runs however are only practical if the conversion and transportation aspects are simultaneously addressed, an aspect that brings a new dimension to the issue. Our poster presentation displays above information with some pictures.