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Dynamic Simulation of Warehouse Operations
FN Steel, HQ in the Netherlands, is a producer of untreated wire rod and drawn wire with a focus on customization for markets such as automotive, construction, tooling and engineering. FN Steel has in-house production (pickling, annealing, drawing) and warehousing facilities.
Opportunities
FN Steel was facing a tremendous business growth. In order to meet customer demand, FN Steel asked Groenewout to investigate the required warehousing capacity of their new to-be-built warehouse. After completion of the capacity study, FN Steel asked Groenewout to validate the output of the study by conducting a dynamic simulation exercise.
Solution
- Identify internal logistics processes and flows
- Define input parameters such as process time, MHE types, MHE speed, working hours per shift, distances between work centers and buffering and staging areas, constraints etc.
- Create of a subset of actual production orders and customer orders with actual time stamps for n-days
- Migrate order data into simulation software, and run scenarios
Benefits
- Determine the utilization and waiting time of each MHE type per shift
- Determine utilization of staging space per shift
- Determine MHE to be purchased since a custom-made narrow-aisle truck is about 200k€ per unit
- Output of the simulation reduced the quantity of narrow-aisle trucks by 1 unit