Heuristic approach for warehouse resources and production planning optimization: An industry case study

Industrial sector for production of manufacturing machinery and equipment is a very competitive and difficult market to deal with. Difficulties increase in areas that involves the design, manufacturing and assembly of large production machines. In fact, in this case the effort to produce a single item is much bigger in time, money and resources with respect to other areas. Long time for production paired with a not accurate usage of internal resources can produce a large number of unused components and semi-finished products. This paper presents a real case study of a company leader in the designing and manufacturing machinery for disposable hygienic products and highly automated liquid filling integrated systems. Each product is a huge assembly of components and semi-finished products and many of them are not used for production even if they are stored in company’s warehouses. This is due to the logistic and human factors that can be managed and corrected. In this paper a math-heuristic approach for warehouse resources and components procurement optimization is presented. A real instance related to a commission has been solved and results are presented and analyzed.