Optimizing industrial production with the SCOP Capacity Planning software

BRIDOR specializes in the industrial production of frozen bread and morning goods, baking 4 billion croissants, brioches and other puff pastries per annum. Its top-of-the-range finished goods are sold to bakeries, hotel and mass retail chains in over 100 countries.
Solid mutual trust developed between the BRIDOR Industrial Team and Eurodecision after two successfully completed forecasting and network design assignments. So, BRIDOR was unreserved about approaching the artificial intelligence and supply chain experts to co-develop a solution around a capacity planning engine to improve production planning over a three- to six-month horizon.
As it happens, given the surge in the number of production lines, volumes, increasing item numbers with their associated constraints (allergens, myriad streams, and so on), the teams were finding it increasingly hard to organize production and storage capacities to cope with orders (because of personnel and also materials-related constraints). They wanted an innovative tool at their fingertips that would let them automate and optimize their planning processes while factoring in all the existing constraints.

Eurodecision initially held workshops to ascertain the sector-specific teams’ needs and expectations, before starting work on a prototype from actual pastry production data. The results analysis validated its approach, backing the decision to acquire the applied mathematics-based capacity planning solution. Eurodecision’s engineers integrated all BRIDOR’s specific planning constraints, from human resources (e.g.: the number of people allocated to a task, tough working conditions, etc.) and production (e.g.: adhering to production rates, restricting the use of one line for a single product, post-production machinery cleaning after products containing allergenics substances, etc.).

Now BRIDOR has been using SCOP Capacity Planning since the fall of 2019 to plan production at its two plants, i.e., 11 pastry production lines and 5 bread production lines. In order to present an optimized production plan, the tool gathers daily data on the orders to be processed, sales forecasts, manufacturing orders and maintenance operations planned on the equipment over the planning horizon. Planners can send instructions to the schedulers for the items to be produced per week and per line, after analysis, making adjustments as required.

The SCOP Capacity Planning platform improves BRIDOR’s control over its planning/scheduling process, and contributes to reducing stocks. This makes for real time savings, and offers better visibility of production planning with greater flexibility for production cycle changes. The many indicators provided make this an outstanding decision-making tool. It also performs simulations to examine the impact of a decision on production planning, which will be particularly useful when BRIDOR’s third plant opens. New features will soon be added to the solution to fine-tune supervision of production.