Glass Production

CHALLENGES

The glass industry plays a critical role in the global economy – stretching across various regions around the world and across various industries including automotive, construction, food & beverage, and chemicals – and has expanded significantly in recent years. But with this growth comes increasing competition, costs, and complexity in terms of customer demand, product diversity, and supply chain management.

Glass, from chemical raw materials to final product, goes through a complex set of production processes including melting, annealing, cutting, and finally packaging. The planning of these processes must take into account specific technical and business rules.

To remain profitable, glass manufacturers must be able to overcome numerous, significant business challenges including:

• uncertain demand for a wide variety of glass products (which all differ greatly in quality, size, composition, color, and coating).
• tight delivery deadlines stipulated by individual customers.
• campaign-based production policies.
• the wide and diverse range of glass manufacturing processes, which typically require long set-up times, and cause job-sequencing and batch-sizing issues.
• the complexity and high costs of delivery logistics.

CAPABILITIES

ICRON’s Optimized Decision Making and Supply Chain Optimization solutions give glass manufacturers the capability to conquer their business challenges, to increase operating efficiency and reduce operating expenses, and to optimize the planning and deployment of assets across their global supply chain networks.

With ICRON, glass producers can:

• Automatically generate optimal production, capacity allocation plans that minimize set-up times and operating costs, and maximize resource utilization and on-time delivery.
• Create optimal tactical and strategic plans, which incorporate sales forecasts, operational and safety stocks, resource capacity and campaign constraints.
• Conduct multi-site aggregate planning to determine which products to manufacture at specific facilities, taking into account the costs of production and transportation.