Production Planning and Resource Scheduling of a Brewery with Plant Simulation

In the brewing industry the quantities to be produced for each product are specified in weekly meetings of planning. Afterwards, manually detailed planning and resource scheduling is carried out by a production specialist, who usually takes basic applications developed on MS Excel as a planning support.

A disadvantage of this planning process is the high spending time because of the high complexity of hundreds of constraints involved in the production process and the need of having expertise to understand how the process might change along the week because of many related biological processes.

Through application of simulation with Plant Simulation for production planning and resource scheduling the stated disadvantages can be avoided. This simulation is oriented to be a planning tool that automatically generates the production schedule on the basis of current stocks, master production schedule and minimum lot sizes, which are included taking into account all manufacturing restrictions.

The user can configure plant parameters, stock levels and week production orders. The scheduling tool thus generates the production schedule in a really short time and makes possible evaluating several production scenarios and makes the best decision to optimize plant utilization, stock levels and throughput times.

In this chapter is presented a scheduling tool for breweries based on a simulation of a real plant, the development and the benefits achieved using it in the real process of planning.