Every Configuration, Every Product
~30,000 Simulation Runs Behind One Plant Assessment

A food plant making about 15 million units a year for 17 distribution centers and direct-store delivery needed to know which packing configuration its lines could run. Every line was modeled in every configuration under consideration and run for every product it makes: about 30,000 replications, executed from the command line.

Plant

~15M units a year · 17 DCs + direct-store delivery

Products

12–24 per line

Line models

15, current and future state

Replications

~30,000 · 100 per scenario

Every product runs differently

Each product has its own manufacturing physics: its rates, pack size, changeovers and the station that limits it. A configuration that works for one product can fail for the next, and the line’s stops and micro-stops interact with all of it. A few scenarios on a representative product would have averaged away the variation the decision depends on.

Current state against future state

In the current state the lines pack eaches. The future state case-packs everything, and three ways of getting there were tested on each line: manual case packing, or an automated case packer with overflow either shipped as eaches or packed by hand — on one or two shifts. That is 15 line models, each run for every product the line makes.

How it ran

• Parameter sets generated from the plant’s own data — time studies, planning rates and line event data — for every product, not entered by hand scenario by scenario.
• Executed from the command line. Each model is loaded once and run across all of its products, 100 replications each, with one result row per replication.
• The same engine as the ReliaSim desktop application. Command-line runs reproduced the desktop results in 20 of 20 replications, within 0.005 units.

When each scenario is built and run by hand, the analyst’s time decides how many questions get asked. Here it didn’t.