Ortems Business HowTo SolutionUpdate
Process industries like Food, Chemical or Pharmaceutical often operates tank machines in their manufacturing process.
From a scheduling standpoint, tanks generate complexities like:
- Taking into consideration tank capacity when scheduling a batch (a 10 tons batch can't go on a 5 tons tank)
- Tanks are often physically linked to other tanks or packaging machine via physical pipes, restricting the authorized materials flows
- Tanks are not only occupied during the "processing time" but also while it is filled-in or emptied
All listed constraints can be managed by DELMIA Ortems but let's now focus on the last one.
DELMIA Ortems OOTB capabilities enable to model the draining of the upstream tank until the end of the downstream packaging order (that's called "availability constraint", visually represented as black triangles in the below images). This works very well when having one single tank feeding one single packaging work order.
However, let's assume we have now 3 tanks feeding one single packaging order. Initially, DELMIA Ortems capabilities worked as first image below: all 3 tanks would be occupied until the end of the packaging work order.
/!\\ That is not accurate representation of the reality as each tank would normally be emptied one by one. Once the first tank is empty, next work order can be scheduled on this tank, even if packaging order initially being supplied keeps running: work order D of below image should be scheduled much earlier /!\\
Thanks to DELMIA Services team, new capabilities have been developed to improve modeling accuracy.
Now, the availability constraint (= the black triangles of the images) are calculated as per the quantity supplied by each tank work order to the finished product. In the below example, we can see that Tank 1 is made available earlier, enabling work order D to be scheduled earlier.
This modeling improvement helps to optimize tank resources occupancy. Most of companies struggle very much with tanks scheduling, applying a lot of buffers and idle time due to poor visibility. DELMIA Ortems truly enables to increase productivity thanks to end to end synchronization (from process/tanks up to packaging) and superior tank scheduling.
Activating this capability would require specific configuration, please don't hesitate to contact DELMIA.Ortems.CoE-SolutionConsulting@3ds.com in order to learn more.
