Production Scheduling and Distribution Planning at FATER S.p.A.

We present the relevant outcomes of the research co-operation between Università della Calabria and FATER S.p.A., an Italian nationwide company holding several leading brands in the area of disposable diapers. The aim of such co-operation has been to tackle some issues regarding production scheduling and distribution management at FATER. In particular, two problems have been addressed: (i) the optimal lot-size management of the FIX2 production line located in the Pescara plant, and the distribution of goods from the production plant to the distribution depots covering the entire national territory. As for the former, the classic production-rotation model has been adapted to the FATER framework for taking into account different possible scenarios in terms of manpower weekly shifts. As for the latter, an inventory–routing model adopting a simplified column-generation approach has been proposed. We describe the two optimization problems and the adopted solution approaches, giving also some details on the related software packages implementing such methods, along with the relevant results.