Tactical Planning with Shelf-Life Constraints in the FMCG Industry

摘要

Shelf-life restrictions play an important role in the tactical planning for the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. Ignoring shelf-life limitations could lead to unnecessary waste of products and missed sales. We present 3 methods of implementing shelf-life limitations in an LP planning model. A direct method, where the number of weeks since a product was produced is tracked, an indirect method, which ensures that the total shelf-life of a product is not exceeded, and a hybrid method that models the shelf-life on the first storage stage directly and on the second stage indirectly. With the direct method solutions with the lowest costs were obtained. However, with the hybrid method solutions with a cost increase of only 0.01-0.03% could be obtained in about 1/5th of the computational time. With the indirect method solutions could be obtained in 1/50th of the time of the direct method. However, the costs increased by up to 13.3%.