Swiss Chemical Company

Developing an algorithm to determine optimal formula composition alternatives to reduce costs by up to 50% while keeping a similar molecular quality

Challenge

• Varying price and availability of ingredients over time due to supply chain issue, for example
• These issues put pressure on profit margin and order fulfillment
• Previously, finding cost-efficient and ingredients with decent availability was done manually and automation attempts had failed to bring tangible results

Solution

• Completely changed to optimisation algorithm from previous failed attempts
• Our approach tries to find a new set of ingredients which keeps the same molecules as originally but at a lower cost
• Possible to tune the results based on a cost vs. result spectrum
• Built a user-friendly frontend to deploy the solution in self-service

Business impact

• Frontend makes it incredibly easy for flavourers to compare optimised formulas with the originals and save results
• Algorithm finds better solutions with an optimal trade-off between cost and molecular quality
• Reduction of cost by up to 50%
• Unit8 algorithm runs in seconds instead of hours for previous algos