Every Configuration, Every Product
Testing a Line Change Across the Whole Product Range

A packing, staffing or equipment change has to work for every product a line makes, and a few scenarios on a representative product won’t show where it breaks. Here’s how one food plant, making about 15 million units a year for 17 distribution centers and direct-store delivery, tested every line in every configuration for every product. That added up to about 30,000 replications, executed from the command line.

The example

~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. Three ways of getting there were tested on each line, on one or two shifts: manual case packing, or an automated case packer with overflow either shipped as eaches or packed by hand.

How it ran

• Parameter sets generated from the plant’s own data (time studies, planning rates and line event data) for every product, instead of entered by hand one scenario at a time.
• 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, but on this project it didn’t.