Production scheduling leads to fluid processes for coffee supplier Mother Parkers

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, Mother Parkers' VP of supply chain. “We have bins and silos and roasters and lines that we operate continuously. If we were doing a couple of hundred products, a person could mentally figure it out, but 1,400 is too big a mathematical problem. A scheduling system has to distinguish the 1,400 SKUs as well as which route every single one takes through the system—and every one takes a different amount of time.”

Complicating matters is the nature of coffee-bean processing itself. All beans are roasted in one of the plant's five roasters. Because freshly roasted beans produce carbon dioxide that can cause them to explode if they are packaged too soon, they need to be degassed for a fixed period in bins that range from trunk-size to nine-story silos. Resting time varies according to the coffee-bean type and whether it will be ground or packaged whole. Mother Parkers packs coffee in all kinds of containers, including cans and vacuum-packed bags of various sizes, as well as three-ounce pods for coffee makers.

Then there's the matter of the blend. Most Mother Parkers customers want a unique coffee blend with its own distinct taste, Kappel says.

The SCC system schedules the plant's 24-hour production runs in 12-minute intervals. It also consolidates runs of blends and packaging types to minimize changeover on the packaging lines. The application has reduced inventory by aligning schedules with production forecasts.

“Previously, we had so many different combinations of products on the schedule, we were never sure how many we could get to in a day,” says Kappel. “At hour one it was fine, but it got more complex as the day wore on. At hour 15, we didn't know how many different products would be trying to use the same grinder.”

Mother Parkers had been relying on the scheduling software included with its BPCS ERP system, which couldn't keep pace with the coffee producer's complex scheduling needs. Orders and inventory information still flow from that ERP system to the SCC scheduling system.

Now that the new system been in place a year, Kappel is studying its simulation capabilities, and plans to run “what-if?” scenarios to virtually test various line-sequencing arrangements. The system will give Mother Parkers feedback on each potential sequence's effectiveness.

“Learning the software has been like learning to walk,” Kappel says. “We're getting more comfortable with it. Now we want to use it to challenge the rules on how we operate as a business.”