The Question
Case study · Manufacturing · New line design
Client's brief · reconstructed excerpt · values held in confidence
(withheld), a beam manufacturer based in (withheld), is building a new production line at its (withheld) plant that turns steel coil into beams. Some of its steps are borrowed from lines the company runs at (withheld) other plants, some are new, and the raw material differs from anything those plants run. The line is rated at (withheld) feet per minute on paper. The engineering team has the design. What it lacks is a way to see where the line will jam, because there is no line yet and no history to measure. Management wants to see the line perform before it commits (withheld) to it.
Bars cover values SimWell holds and is not releasing. The released figures stand as printed.
§ 1
Every usual check starts from data the line hasn't produced. Rated speeds come from equipment specs, and coil-fed lines rarely hold them: on roll forming lines, coil changes, threading, and coil handling routinely leave a line running at a fraction of its rated feet per minute. Borrowed steps behave differently next to new ones, and a new material changes cycle times nobody has timed. A spreadsheet can add up rated speeds. It cannot show which station waits on which.
§ 2
SimWell built the line from the engineering team's design, from the forklift picking a coil to the finished beam, and walked the team through it until they approved it as their line. With no history to validate against, that review stood in for validation. The model carried the details that decide where a line jams: the production schedule and its sequence, production rates, setup and cycle times, failure and repair times, support equipment, and the people running it.
§ 3
Three months of production, run again and again with the inputs changed: 16 to 23 coil types, equipment failures, the historical job sequence against new sequences, and how busy the forklift feeding coils would be. Each run reported beam output in feet per minute and, for every resource, how often it was blocked, for how long, and how its time split between busy, idle, and starved. A station that keeps the line starved or blocked is the bottleneck, and the runs showed where.
Representative model. The bottleneck, rates, and fixes shown are illustrative, not client data.
Cleared for release
The engineering team used the model extensively to remove the bottlenecks from the design before the line ran, and used it to show management how the line would perform.
The model stays with the team as a way to test sequencing and run policies product by product.
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.
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