Case studies

Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, asked Fair Dynamics, in collaboration with Health Services Consulting Corporation, to develop a platform that would help the company’s researchers test a new drug for patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy. The platform would be based on previous clinical studies and act as a decision support tool, which could assess a patient’s personal parameters, prescribe drug dosage, and predict possible outcomes.

The port of Le Havre, France, needed support for construction of new multimodal terminal. The issue that required simulation was supporting containers transfer between rail trains/river barges and other existing terminals, which transferred these containers to and from sea transport.

Canada is the third largest country to have oil reserves. However, most of the oil is in oil sand – the mixture of sand, oil, and water – which has to be heated up with steam to emit the oil. It is costly to maintain such a distribution system, and outages may lead to disruptions in steam injection and oil production. Stream Systems company applied AnyLogic simulation modeling to optimize expenditures and capture production lags.

Kuehne+Nagel, a leading global provider of logistics solutions, was involved in planning a new warehouse for one of their clients. The warehouse would process 13K order lines or 750 picking cartons per day. The project included the development of the best algorithm for multi-order picking. It was planned that the orders in the warehouse would be served by workers with trolleys (or fangos). Workers with trolleys would pick the goods and put them in cartons by order.

Alstom is a global leader in the transportation sector. The company offers trains, signaling, maintenance services, as well as integrated transport systems. Among Alstom’s products are the TGV and Eurostar high-speed trains. The company has 105 sites with more than 34,000 employees worldwide. Its net income is €475 mln. Alstom considers innovation to be crucial in meeting the mobility challenges of the future. Together, with SimPlan, they agreed on developing a digital decision support system for train fleet maintenance management.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company in 2014. The company was launching a new vaccine product on a new market that needed a distribution network different from what they had before. Therefore, the company needed to design a new supply chain and align manufacturing processes with it.

How DHL optimized warehouse order picking and improved efficiency. Analysis using simulation-based modeling increased picking speed and reducing order completion times. The tool integrates with warehouse management systems.

The Port of Long Beach, California, planned to invest up to $1 billion dollars in its Pier B Yard rail facility. TranSystems, with over 25 years of experience in the transport and supply chain space, worked with the port to quantify system requirements to meet capacity goals and to gain stakeholder consensus. Modeling the rail system of the port was necessary to demonstrate to the stakeholders the required changes.

Load and haul optimization aims to maximize the efficiency of the transportation of materials from the mine face to the processing area or dump. The Komatsu Mining Technology Solutions Team created a generic mining simulation model that would help with this, concentrating on the movement of haul trucks from shovels to drop-off points and back. Furthermore, they developed extensions of the model to incorporate battery electric trucks for mines and their own internal simulator.

Fruit of the Loom (FOTL) is one of the largest US apparel manufacturers and marketers. The company was expanding, and the executives wanted to know if it would be beneficial, in terms of shipping costs, to add a new distribution center (DC) in the US, or to redistribute products to a pre-existing DC. The contractors decided to simulate the whole supply chain in order to visualize DC locations on a GIS map, and the supply network between them. Focusing on wholesales, the company considered distributors as customers. No small packages or end-users were involved in this case.