Challenge

When a project is clear, it can be done extremely fast. This is one of these projects where the knowledge of the production facility was so good that it was a matter of implementing it without delays. The project had as aim to build a newspaper manufacturing facility. The papers were produced in 1 to 4 machines operating at all hours. These news papers were transported by forklifts and later loaded to trucks for shipment. The idea was to understand the current state and define different strategic elements such as number of resources, number of machines, number of trucks, number of gates and set up different logic to see what works better in order to minimize the waiting time of trucks for the deliveries.

Solution

The solution was a discrete-events model built in AnyLogic with several statistics as outputs, exports to Excel, information on production status, details on errors such as overload, bottle necks etc.

The aim was to illustrate the time schedule from the collection of manufactured products from a machine to the loading of the products for delivery. The following questions, were clarified in the simulation:

• How many products are to be stored on the machine when a production run first passes through completely before being transferred to an intermediate storage area for loading?
• How does loading change if multiple forklifts are used to load the truck?
• How long is the waiting time of the vehicles before loading? how long does it take to load them?

Outcome

This project was presented to high management as a demo to pursue additional projects non-simulation related. No process improvement was necessary and no new strategies to improve operations were requested.

Project Features

• Industry: Manufacturing
• Model: Discrete-Events
• Duration: 2 Weeks