Abstract

Material requirement planning in production systems usually require product explosion in order to determine the raw materials required to produce a given quantity of product in a given horizon. Product explosion can easily be done in cases when the product is a discrete item but becomes impossible in flow production processes. In this situation an appropriate method of relating input to output of processes, such as transfer function, would be used as an alternative to product explosion in material requirement planning. In this study, transfer function is used to model the relationship between the input and output of a brewery. It involved taking the inputs and outputs to the brewery for three different periods and determining the transfer functions. The determined transfer functions were compared with an equivalent model obtained using regression analysis. The results show that transfer function models performed better than regression analysis. In addition the raw materials quality variability and product variability, a key characteristics of the process industry, was effectively modeled. Transfer function is therefore recommended as the preferred tool for material requirement planning for breweries.

Keywords:

Brewery, material requirement planning, modelling, multi input single output process, transfer function,

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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