Browsing by Author "Mac Cawley, A."

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    A decision support system for planning and scheduling bottling lines in a large winery
    (2017) Mac Cawley, A.; Maturana Valderrama, Sergio; Pascual, R.
    Planning and scheduling bottling lines in large wineries is an important process that greatly impacts production costs of large wineries, which have several of these lines, and the service level it provides to its clients. A ''good" plan needs to ensure that the wine is packaged and available on time to serve the demand, or else it can affect the service level given to the customer; it also should keep inventory low and efficiently use the bottling lines and labor. The many different aspects that have to be considered, such as the sequence of the products to be bottled, the constraints that have to be met due to production, sanitation, and labor requirements, the different types of setups, some of which are sequence dependent, and the large number of products that have to be scheduled on the different bottling lines, make it a very hard problem to solve without the help of a decision support system (DSS). We describe in this paper a DSS that was implemented for a large winery in the US that uses a mathematical model to help find a good plan that both minimizes production costs and maximizes the service level of their clients. The results obtained on test problems showed that the system could obtain cost reductions in the order of 15% to 30%. A visualization and intervention software was built into the system to support the planning process by allowing the planner an easy visualization of the production schedule through Gantt charts and also the possibility to intervene the solution using drag and drop. Key performance indicators are also presented to help analyze the solution from a cost, production parameter, demand, and capacity perspective. The system is able to provide good solutions in a reasonable amount of time, running on a standard personal computer.