Use Case
Automating Planning in Food & Beverage

Challenge

Scheduling five filling lines was a fully manual, weekly exercise. Planners pulled data from five to seven disconnected source systems and reconciled it by hand, with no single source of truth. This created four recurring problems:

➜  Manual scheduling, every week

Production, planning and maintenance leads cross-referenced forecasts, stock, machine state and order books by hand ➜ slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale. 

➜  Lines running under capacity

Without optimisation, filling lines sat idle or ran in the wrong sequence. Capacity the plant already paid for went unused. 

➜  Unplanned downtime and waste

Poor sequencing drove avoidable stoppages and overproduction of short shelf-life SKUs that ended up scrapped. 

➜  Emergency Saturday shifts 

When the week's plan slipped, the only fix was costly weekend shifts to catch up on orders. 

Approach

Wizata delivered an automated production scheduling system built on three layers, so schedules are generated automatically and every decision is explainable.

The following activities were per­formed:

➜  Unified data pipeline

Five to seven source systems ➜ stock, sales forecasts, machine states and order books — were merged into one clean schema, giving planners a single source of truth. 

➜ Optimisation engine

An OR-Tools CP-SAT constraint solver sequences every order automatically against the plant's real-world constraints to hit target KPIs ➜ line utilisation, on-time delivery and waste reduction. 

➜ Decision-ready interface

Planners see the proposed schedule, compare scenarios side by side, and validate with one click. Every plan comes with a plain-language rationale ➜ no black box. 

Outcome

Automating production scheduling delivered measurable change on the plant floor: