Blog Post
AIMMS Enables Fast, Profitable Production Planning at Nampak
About Nampak
Nampak is Africa’s leading packaging company. Nampak Glass, the bottling division of the company, operates a world-class manufacturing plant in Roodekop, South Africa. They provide customers with an extremely diverse range of award-winning glass products, assisting them with bottle inception, technical drawing and design requirements as well as trial mold testing. Nampak was looking for a new solution to improve production planning.
Problem
Increasing needs for product flexibility and production efficiency, paired with rising demand volatility required Nampak Glass to improve their ability to deploy the best possible production schedule at all times. A redesign of the scheduling process was necessary to align different production phases. Given the complexity of Nampak Glass’ supply chain and production process, there was also a need for more advanced planning tools. The team was using Excel, which allowed them to manage their schedule at a basic level but didn’t provide the ability to make fast, complex, optimized calculations or quantify the financial impact of their planning decisions.
Solution
Nampak chose AIMMS’ optimization software and Districon, an AIMMS implementation partner, to develop a Profit Based optimization solution for the detailed planning and scheduling of glass bottles in the company’s 3 furnaces – amounting to a total of over 1000 production tons a day. Named GOBSS (Glass Optimization Business Software Solution), the tool leverages AIMMS’ modeling technology on a strategic level (plan for the next two years), tactical level (mid-term scenario planning to support their S&OP process) and operational level (number of bottles on each line). GOBSS was developed in 6 months and is now used to support the company’s schedulers, sales and management teams to make the best business decisions.
“Our business requirements are not only complex but unique in nature and working with the right tools and the right team was imperative for us to achieve our goals. AIMMS allows us to make better informed decisions, it is flexible, easily implemented, and quick to deliver.” – Paul Coombe, Supply Chain Director, Nampak Glass
Results
Thanks to their AIMMS-based production planning application, Nampak is able to:
- Respond quickly to customer changes in the market and production changes internally
- Quantify planning changes in a financial way
- Extract more value from their planning process
- Maintain customer service at a reasonable level of profit for the business
“The development, customization and ‘go live’ of the AIMMS software for Nampak were done in record time, enhancing our business rhythm, but more importantly it delivered incredible stability operationally,” – Pieter van den Berg, Divisional Managing Director, Nampak Glass.
Solution implemented by AIMMS partner:
