A cloud-based optimizer plans Switzerland's biggest brewery up to 52 weeks ahead

Feldschlösschen, Switzerland's leading brewery and beverage distributor (part of the Carlsberg Group since 2000), faced complex production planning across 13 production resources, 8 storage groups, and more than 220 finished and 100 semifinished products.

Researchers from the University of Hamburg built a decision support system around a multilevel capacitated lot-sizing model covering brewery-specific requirements, with a user interface for data collection and validation.

Cloud-based optimization runs the effort-intensive computations, and a visualization tool publishes results as standardized reports for supply chain executives.

The DSS reduces planning effort while improving quality by considering the entire production system, and cuts total cost through optimized schedules and avoided ineffective investments.

Optimize across 13 lines, not one recipe at a time

Modeling all 13 lines together beat planning each product separately.

A 52-week horizon made assortment and investment decisions testable.

Cloud compute made heavy lot-sizing runs practical for daily use.

Standardized reports made optimization results usable by executives.

Brewery planning is a whole-system optimization: model all lines and products together in the cloud so executives can test assortment and investment scenarios before committing.

The system was implemented at Feldschlösschen and highlighted by the OR Society as 'Optimisation Keeps the Beer Flowing'; the paper appeared in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (2022).