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- Ensures accurate order fulfillment
- Reduces batch splitting
- Optimizes distribution
- Helps meet government regulations
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| "We’ve had nothing but success with ILOG OPL Development Studio. It lets us develop fast
and deliver excellent customer support. No doubt we made the right decision in going with
ILOG." |
Steffen Lukesch
Organization Programmer
Südzucker A.G.
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Business
Südzucker A.G leads the European sugar market with a wide range of sugar products for home and
commercial use. It also participates in related segments of the food industry, such as
frozen food and fruit-juice concentrates. One of its primary operations is the distribution
of sugar beet seeds to farmers.
Goal
Government regulations require beet seeds to be traceable back to their point of origin. To comply
with these regulations and ensure the safe distribution of the seeds, Südzucker relies on a planning and scheduling solution designed to assemble each shipment from the fewest number of seed batches.
Application
Südzucker’s Seed Batch Distribution System (SBDS) creates a solution that matches warehouse stock to the
quantities requested. The application processes both simple and complex data to optimally
fill the shipments necessary to satisfy thousands of orders from more than 20,000 farmers
annually. SBDS uses a mathematical model built and maintained with ILOG OPL Development Studio
and an application based on ILOG CPLEX.
Results
The SBDS mathematical model applies data for the warehouses and the seed batches in order to efficiently and accurately fill each shipment with the fewest batches. This makes tracing the seeds back to their origin easier should an issue arise concerning the seeds. The company now achieves a much higher level of safety for better ensuring the traceability of its seeds. Deployed in 2003, SBDS has been highly successful in helping Südzucker meet government regulations.
Technical
ILOG OPL Development Studio is a rapid development tool for ILOG CPLEX. OPL Interfaces are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow programming in C++, Java or the Microsoft .NET platform. OPL models couple with external data sources to create complete, powerful, flexible applications. ILOG CPLEX is a mathematical programming engine that provides flexible, high-performance optimizers for solving linear programming, quadratic programming, quadratically constrained programming and mixed integer programming problems
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