The right recipe

FT_03_2014

EDV & Warenwirtschaft EDP & Commodity Management 38 3/2014 Foto: CSB-System The right recipe Recipes have to be faultless regard-ing their quality but at the same time the costs for the raw materi-als used have to be as low as possible. For food production, this means that the optimum recipe must fulfil food law and organoleptic requirements and must be producible from numerous raw material combinations that can be used as alter-natives. Integrated Recipe Optimization in the CSB-System is a powerful and practice- proven module for food producers which uses linear programming to create cost-efficient recipes with the same quality or better. This requires that all production-specific data be fed into the optimization procedure. The optimization model is mainly based on the following parameters: A Cost-efficient use of raw materials A Provisioning for production losses A Consideration of additives used in the mixture A Food law requirements A Organoleptic requirements of the recipe. Recipe optimization can be done on the basis of different starting situations. Gen-erally, two situations are imaginable: In the first one, production planning is the optimization basis. Here, differ-ent planning horizons – long, medium and short-term planning – are taken into account. At this point in time, the procurement processes for the compo-nents that have to be optimized for the planned recipes have not yet been car-ried out. The “plan recipe optimization” serves as a tool for optimum procurement of raw materials and components. In the second situation, the available stock of raw materials and components forms the basis for optimization. It is assumed that the production process changes sudden-ly and unpredictably. This is the case, for example, when a disruption of the production processes occurs or special customer orders have to be produced at short notice. In this case, recipe op-timization is carried out based on the available components in stock. The tolerances of each ingredient are checked and compared with the respec-tive prices in order to develop the opti-mal recipe for a given point in time from a qualitative and economic perspective. The food law and organoleptic proper-ties of the material recipe to be created using optimization calculation, which can be carried out across the entire product range in the form of single or batch optimization, should be as good as those of a comparable product produced with the original recipe. The most important results of this procedure are clear com-ponent specifications for the ideal recipe, transparent determination of the analysis values of the optimized recipe as well as writing of the optimized recipe into the recipe master. Rising contribution margins The results of the recipe optimization are recorded in the component bills of ma-terial (as optimum recipe). Both material procurement planning and material provi-sioning procedures are triggered based on the optimized BOMs. Optimizing material usage reduces material costs considera-bly and increases contribution margins for every product. The system offers variable recipes enabling user companies to react to fluctuating raw material prices. This allows them to secure their competitiveness at short notice using recipe optimization and to remain flexible throughout the entire production process. www.csb-system.com Continuously rising prices for raw materials and the demand of customers for cheap foods increases the necessity to manufacture products as cost-efficient as possible while also ensuring consistently high quality. The optimum composition of recipes and resulting products is an important prerequisite for the success of companies.


FT_03_2014
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