Align the inventory of ingredients with the new production planning at Ben & Jerry’s

The Ben & Jerry's plant in Hellendoorn has implemented a fixed and repeating production cycle to minimize the changeover time on the production lines. Due to the lack of ingredients that are used in the production process, the planners are not able to stick to the optimal production cycle and production runs are shortened. The situation of Ben & Jerry’s is very complex, due to (i) the fixed and repeating production cycle, (ii) many correlations between C&S, (iii) uncertainty in the lead time and (iv) uncertainty in the demand pattern. Via a dynamic, stochastic and discrete event simulation, the situation of Ben & Jerry’s is modelled and we optimize the settings for the safety stock (SS) and Safety Lead Time (SLT). Those two parameters should cover the uncertainty in the demand pattern and lead time to be able to reach the target service while minimizing the average stock levels. We have been able to increase the fill rate of the portfolio while decreasing the average inventory value. In addition to this, a sensitivity analysis about different forecast biases is executed.