Glass Production

CHALLENGES

The glass industry has critical role in economics – with expansion capability across various regions around the globe and across various industries including automotive, construction, food & beverage, and chemicals – with gross profit margins around 30%.

Glass, from chemical raw materials to final product, goes through a complex set of production processes including melting, annealing, cutting, and finally packaging. Planning of these processes must consider glass specific technical and business rules. For example, furnaces must have uninterrupted production.

Day-to-day supply chain experts in glass industry have to cope with:

• 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 advanced planning and scheduling (APS) solution gives 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.