2010 Wagner Prize Finalist - Kimberly Clark Latin American Operations

Kimberly-Clark Latin America Builds an Optimal Scheduling System

We present an optimization-based solution for lot-sizing and scheduling with sequence-dependent setups at Kimberly-Clark Latin America. The formulation weighs inventory, set-up and backorder costs leading to a large MIP. We developed heuristics to reduce its size, obtaining schedules in minutes for industrial scale problems. This solution has replaced manual plans in five countries, reducing finished product inventories up to 45%, increasing yield and uptime by 2% and service levels by 2.4%.