Optimizing the planning of IBC usage in pharmaceutical industry

An Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) is used to contain raw materials and semi-products in pharmaceutical company ABC. Due to the high price of an IBC, company ABC sought to minimize the number of IBCs needed to support the production of four separate products. In this project, five IBCs drivers that affect or determine the number of IBCs required were identified. Deterministic models were established to determine the minimum number of IBCs needed for each product given the production plan in 2009. The cleaning schedule for IBCs was modified to reuse IBCs as much as possible. In this paper, we analyze the management of 600L IBCs. We simulate a two machines finite-buffer line model to estimate the optimum buffer size. We collected equipment downtime data to estimate the parameters for the simulation model. We use the simulation to determine the number of 600L IBCs needed for each campaign; the number of 600L IBCs was reduced from 12 to 8. Additional analysis examined the reduction of usage of 1800L IBCs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Chen, Xiaowen, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen C. Graves.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46162

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46162