Heuristic Approach for Production Planning in Agro-Industrial SMEs

This paper presents the advances related to the activities carried out in an agro-industrial SME in Rafaela, Argentina. The company specializes in the commercialization of gearboxes for agricultural machinery, as well as component parts for such gearboxes as spare parts. Currently, the company lacks a planning system that allows it to organize its operations, resulting in non-compliance with agreed delivery dates (with associated costs). This paper presents an initial approach to the operations management problem (i.e., purchasing management, stock management, supplier selection, and production planning), which involves the development of a mathematical programming model. The constraints integrated into the model arise from the actual needs of the company, addressing the issue of shortages in a general sense (late deliveries of gearboxes and lost sales of component parts as spares). The objective is to define the policies to be followed in the next quarter in a way that minimizes component acquisition costs, maintains appropriate stock levels (both for gearboxes and components), and minimizes late deliveries to customers. As for the preliminary results obtained, the model was tested with a subset of products and compared with the available sales history. The results were promising: the historical operations, without a decision support tool, had less than 30 % on-time delivery (meaning that over 70 % of deliveries were made after the agreed-upon date), while the solution proposed by the model resulted in 98 % on-time deliveries, with proper management of component parts stock.