Swiss Chemical Company

Defining an mathematically optimal manufacturing sequence order to reduce total production time of perfumes

Challenge

• Manufacturing line produces perfumes by blending ingredients
• Sequence order can be optimised to reduce time and complexity of production
• Goal to compute optimal scheduling to pour ingredients for each blend
• Past factory data was scarce and implementation initially seemed complicated

Solution

• Implemented mathematical optimisation algorithm that defined optimal production sequence to manufacture perfumes
• Simulation to test impact of different optimisation methods compared to what happens in the factory
• Chose “Iterated Greedy” method

Business impact

• Faster manufacturing due to mathematically optimal production sequence
• Approx. 3% improvement in manufacturing speed
• Resulting in 6 digits cost saving figures