The Question
Case study · Food manufacturing · Bakery
Client brief
Cookies United bakes everything in one plant in Islip, New York: bulk cookies for supermarket bakery cases, CakeBites for national retailers, and more gingerbread house kits than any other domestic manufacturer. More than 400 products move across five lines. Some products run on more than one line, and some are assembled from other products. Demand peaks in the fourth quarter, beyond what the lines can make in those months, so product has to be built ahead and carried into the season. Every plan sets what each line runs, how much labor and overtime to schedule, and how much inventory to hold going into the peak. A planner builds that plan by hand in a spreadsheet, and the plan is as good as the person building it. The planning team needs a full year's plan it can rerun whenever demand moves.
§ 1
A bakery that sells much of its year in a few months has to start that season long before it arrives. The question is how far ahead to start, and on which line. Build too early and inventory sits in storage, carrying cost. Build too late and the peak months run on overtime, or orders go short. On Long Island, where labor runs pricier than at bakeries in other regions, an hour of overtime costs more than it would for many competitors.
Each product adds its own constraints. Some can run only on certain lines, some products feed other products, and every switch between products costs changeover time. Across 400-plus products and five lines over twelve months, the interactions outgrow what a spreadsheet can hold. A planner could build a workable plan, but nobody could say whether a cheaper one existed, or what the plan would look like if the demand forecast moved.
§ 2
SimWell built an optimization model of the plant's year. The model takes in demand, line capacities, labor capacity, processing times, and which products can run on which lines. It weighs changeover, overtime, and inventory carrying costs together, and returns the lowest-cost production plan that meets demand within those constraints.
The planning team runs the model from a web app. Planners set the costs and weights, review the input data, launch a run, and read the plan in charts and dashboards in the same place. A full-year plan comes back in under five minutes, so the team can test several scenarios in one sitting instead of committing to the first plan that works. The model handles any time step and horizon. Cookies United set it up to plan monthly over a one-year horizon, and new products and lines go in as data.
Results
The tool put the pre-build decision on evidence. Planners could compare plans on total cost, see how much inventory each one carried into the peak and how much overtime it left, and choose with the tradeoffs in view. The plan no longer had to depend on who built it, and a shift in the forecast meant a rerun instead of a rebuild.
SimWell helps operators make better decisions under uncertainty. We build simulation and optimization models that reflect operational reality, test scenarios before committing resources, and transfer capability so teams can run decisions independently.
More case studies
An embedded SimWell planning team turned a single optimization pilot into multi-year planning infrastructure and surfaced a $20M+ annual profit layer outside the original scope.
Read the case studyA sulfur logistics model found the real constraint two stations upstream of where every operations team was pointing and redirected a capex decision worth hundreds of millions.
Read the case studyIndependent pre-feasibility logistics research found two routes prior advisors had missed and informed a US$25M commitment on deadline.
Read the case studyWant to learn more? Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates and industry news.
