Advanced planning and scheduling can play a crucial role in the food and beverage industry, as companies strive to increase production, optimise inventory levels and make better use of resources. In the food and beverage sector, brewing is one of the most demanding applications. The characteristics of the brewing process - filtering, tank storage, packaging and shipping - present an ongoing challenge to the beer industry as more throughput is demanded from capacity constrained plant. These, together with shifting consumer purchasing patterns, and the need to optimise brand diversity against market share, have forced the industry to look for more effective and agile means of satisfying distributors and consumers.
Not only has the volume of beer produced globally increased, but the number and range of wort streams, brands and stock-keeping units (SKUs) available have multiplied. The expansion of contract brewing has put pressure on brewing utilisation, reducing downtime available to recover lost production.
A medium-sized brewery produces 15 million litres of beer a month, packing more than 20 000 cans an hour on dozens of lines running 24x7. The management of such volumes, together with variations in wort streams, alcohol percentages, fermentation times and maximising tank capacity plays an important role in the supply chain, directly influencing the packing and shipping of the product.
"Excess capacity is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in the brewing industry," says Gavin Halse, MD of ApplyIT, a software solution provider to the process manufacturing industry. "The co-ordination and synchronisation of production and material across all brewery processes are vital to having the right beer to ship at the right time."
While all breweries can produce a feasible schedule based on experience and proven techniques, this is not sustainable as throughput is increased. Eventually a decision will result either to implement advanced supply chain software, or increase capacity by investing in capital plant and equipment.
In some situations, however, expansion of plant and equipment is simply not feasible due to space, environmental or other physical constraints on site.
Selecting the right scheduling software can therefore be crucial to the viability of a brewing facility in a region. The software needs to be scalable, capable of handling thousands of orders a day for hundreds of products, both automatically and manually. Typical complexities include being able to monitor precise filtration times, manage speeds of tank through-flow, synchronise the management of multiple storage tanks and adjust fixed and non-fixed throughput rates.
Volume-constrained resources such as tanks, silos, pipelines or warehouse space require unique scheduling functionality. Often the most important aspect of tank scheduling is that the volume of a vessel depends on the processes before and after storage, rather than solely on the characteristics of the tank. Similarly, just-in-time delivery calls for exact scheduling that is adjustable in time and quantity.
Volume issues are a common challenge for schedulers, and endless variables affect each batch produced. Flow rates between two tanks can easily be constrained by pipeline capacity, volume of by-product or waste produced. Silos, which hold solids as opposed to liquids, tend to hold varying amounts based on the product they contain. As settling occurs, the solid content forms a cone shape, affecting the potential volume of the silo. Even the freeing up of tanks is not necessarily a constant - it is the next process in line that determines when the batch can be emptied from the tank.
"Initially, many of these issues are overlooked by brewers when investigating scheduling tools. Underestimating this complexity is also the main reason in-house development projects inevitably have a limited success rate. Scheduling applications need to handle the broad range of complexities of a brewing facility, while also working seamlessly with the company`s ERP systems, to provide both feasible and optimised plans to cover each operational eventuality," Halse points out.
Simply using ERP systems to schedule complex operational processes can be a flawed approach. For instance, ERP systems often only have one storage point per product and splitting this point into individual lots makes scheduling extremely difficult and the resultant solution sub-optimal.
In a simple model, operation times include move, queue, set-up, run and clean-up times. The run component is typically based on the number of units that need to be produced. Process tanks, however, often need an additional component, which is idle or rest time. Systems designed around a simple model cannot accurately account for the idle time for a batch. This can impact on the quality of the finished product and ultimately can lead to an unfeasible or suboptimal schedule.
Most scheduling software consumes volume by converting tank capacity into time. The problem occurs when duration needs to be extended. The run rate then must be redefined, which introduces a considerable maintenance problem for the scheduler and renders the software impractical on a daily basis.
"A reliable scheduling application must provide an intuitive visual planning board that is easy to read and fully adjustable, displaying production results in real-time and graphically alerting the planner to violations of due times, capacities, manpower, inventory and other constraints. Maximising capacity, increasing plant flexibility, continuously improving quality and customer service can be achieved through the right advanced scheduling software.
"Such scheduling applications do exist and have been proven in brewing for many years. These tools can provide a conceptually sound platform on which a brewery can optimise its processes. While this example has focuses on the challenges of brewing, these tools have equally compelling applications in most food and beverage companies," concludes Halse.
Share
Editorial contacts