Capacity assessment for a shared multi-product conveyor system under different product combination scenarios

In a BabyCare plant, two multi-product production lines share a single palletizing workstation. Both lines feed their output to a shared conveyor. This conveyor that links the two production lines to the palletizing station also acts as a work-in-progress inventory. Depending on various factors including product-dependent production rates of these lines, interruptions on the lines and/or palletizer, the load on the conveyor may fluctuate significantly. Certain product mixes may lead to blockage on the conveyor, which in turn leads to inefficiencies for the production line couple as a whole. In this project, the team is expected to work with the problem owner (i.e. a FMCG company) in order to analyze the current situation, and conduct an analysis with different product combination in order to identify the combinations and conditions for which the current production system is likely to experience capacity problems. As a follow up, the team will experiment with alternatives in order to assess whether the identified problems can be alleviated with interventions deemed to be feasible and applicable by the problem owner.