Reizend has provided a Production Analytics solution to one of India’s leading footwear manufacturers. The company manages its extensive supply chain through a combination of manufacturing units and depots spread across 18 states in India. They produce around 600 articles, around 1600 color levels and 7000+ SKUs.

With the help of the Shop Floor Algorithm platform which Reizend has developed and deployed in the production floors, they are now in a better control to meet their incoming demands and optimize the utilization of their costly machines which run 24X7. The major challenge in front of them was to produce the articles purely based on the market demand with a view to increase market share and avoid back orders. Since footwear comes under the fashion industry, the designs keep on changing with the market trend and it is not at all ideal to produce more and keep in stock as the same may go obsolete when the market trend changes. This unique nature of the business demands a controlled production, at the same time keeping the incoming market demands and fuller utilization of the costly machines in consideration. Reizend created a Shop Floor Algorithm to tackle this extremely complex situation and this algorithm gives the feed to the machines as to what to produce and in what quantity ensuring the maximum utilization of the machines keeping the market demands as one of the major criteria.

To develop this complex algorithm, Reizend had to consider different input sources such as the ERP data, different market demand input data such as MTO, MPO, Safety Stock level, Depot and Unit specific requirement, FIU Stock, High Priority Item, Work In Progress of the previous day’s scheduling, etc. and generate an optimum production schedule by considering the different amount of user defined weightages.

The ultimate highlight is that such an innovative and efficient algorithm generates the production schedule in less than 3 minutes time, saving a huge amount of manual effort thereby ensuring excellent precision. To ensure the speed, accuracy and scalability aspects of this solution, we have selected Big Data technologies backed by Python-based frameworks. With the help of this algorithm, factory floors are now able to achieve maximum productivity thereby removing the process losses such as the frequency of the mold changes during the production process, free rotation of the stations without any production, etc.

The Analytics dashboards enable the floor managers and other key persons in charge of the production process, to have a clear visibility of productivity in terms of % utilization of the factory floor and % utilization of the machines. Using Data Analytics, now the footwear company is able to evaluate the utilization of a machine to the minutest level possible such as the case-wise or pair-wise quantity expected versus case-wise or pair-wise quantity achieved for each machine on the floor along with the percentage of production achieved as per the different internal priorities.