The production scheduling in a brewery has to consider a lot of data in the planning time horizon simultaneously, such as multiple machines with different capacities and specificities, multiple products to be produced with different demands, multiple production stages involving sequence-dependent setup times and costs, multiple tanks for preparation and fermentation of different liquids, synchronization of the stages, storing ‘‘ready’’ liquid waiting for the bottling. Even with all these data, it is still very challenging to devise good production plans.

In practice, many companies determine the production plan manually, which can take hours until a satisfactory plan is achieved. Moreover, it is often needed to reschedule the production due to the occurrence of unforeseen events and changes of information, for example, extra client requests, machine shutdowns and unexpected shortages of raw material.

The production scheduling in a brewery differs from those in beverage industries due to the relatively long lead times required for the fermentation and maturation processes and because the ‘‘ready’’ liquid can remain in the tanks for some time before being bottled.

The main planning challenge is to synchronize the two stages (preparation of liquids and bottling), as the production bottlenecks may alternate between these stages during the planning horizon.

XSEED Brewery is state-of-the-art optimization software for production scheduling in a brewery integrating both the stages.

Our analytics products are extremely configurable and scalable. If your organization requires customization of the optimization model to incorporate your organization’s unique performance metrics or unique business rules, our optimization experts can customize the product quickly and deliver it.

Contact us for more details on this optimization software.