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Even the most ardent caffeine addicts would find the complexity of a coffee-packaging operation an eye opener. Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee roasts, grinds, and packages hundreds of coffee blends for leading grocery and restaurant chains at its Mississauga, Ontario plant. No surprise the plant's scheduling software couldn't keep up.
One year ago, Mother Parkers installed a system that creates optimal schedules for the plant's 26 packaging lines. The system was built by Supply Chain Consultants (SCC), a software vendor that specializes in solving supply chain planning and scheduling problems.
At Mother Parkers, SCC personnel traced each product backward from packaging through all production stages. They then wrote algorithms to account for each stage, says Tom Leonarski, SCC senior analyst, food processing.
One day in late February, 1,400 SKUs waited for processing at the plant, which has annual capacity to produce 100 million pounds of coffee.
"The mathematical scheduling combinations here are just tremendous," says Will Kappel,...