OCP scheduled plants, stock and ships together, adding $240M turnover

OCP's African downstream phosphate supply chain needed to coordinate sites, stock and shipping. The old planning process was a bottleneck, and separate tools could not reliably maximize demand fulfillment across production, inventory and vessels.

The operations research team turned the bottleneck into a joint scheduling problem. The clever part was not just using exact and heuristic tools; it was treating confirmed orders as fixed enough to anchor the plan while preserving flexibility for unconfirmed demand.

The system became central to OCP planning. Management credited the operationalized optimizer with benefits that contributed to more than $240 million in increased annual turnover.

Optimize confirmed and uncertain orders differently

Production, stock and vessel decisions are tightly coupled, so optimizing them separately hides trade-offs.

Hybrid Benders decomposition made a hard integrated model practical enough for planners to use.

Confirmed orders supplied structure; uncertain orders supplied optionality.

The tool improved multiple sites instead of producing a one-off study.

When uncertainty and commitment coexist, split the model along that line instead of forcing planners to pick one static plan.

OCP planners adopted the optimizer's schedules and insights across sites. The published IJAA article reports that operationalizing the system removed a planning bottleneck and contributed to more than $240 million of annual turnover uplift.