Improving profitability for a global flour
producer with Industrial Mathematics
The Customer
Our client is one of the world’s largest flour millers, with ten mills worldwide producing millions of tonnes of product per year. They coordinate grain purchases and shipping logistics globally of several thousand metric tonnes of wheat daily for their customers.
The Problem
Our client’s aim was to achieve an optimal product sales portfolio and reveal opportunities to minimise costs. Planning for fluctuations in availability and cost of raw commodities, logistical constraints associated with the widespread locations of its mills, and the variety of flour products needed to service customer demand had proven a highly complex problem.
The Challenges
- The global grain market trades grains of varying qualities which are priced according to attributes and market demand, and sensitive to fluctuations in availability
- Each customer/locale required different blends of raw grains and flours of varying qualities
- How to produce logistics schedules that would reduce procurement and shipping costs
- Storage capacity constraints had to be considered
The Solution
Polymathian deployed BOLT, a cloud-based supply chain optimisation decision support tool, resulting in:
- Reduction in production cost while maintaining product quality
- Intelligent stockpiling of product in order to facilitate blending to fulfil varying customer demand
- Detailed vessel planning to achieve most cost-effective shipping and procurement
The Value
13%
Improvement to profitability
50%
Reduction in raw material requirements
Time Saving
Automating manual planning processes