2. The pre-intervention situation
The plant is the main Sara Lee plant for liquid coffee. Liquid coffee is produced for the “out-ofhome”
market. It is used in coffee machines. The plant combines the production of liquids with
the production of instants, but the case study is restricted to the liquids. See Figure 1 for a sketch
of the material flow. Roasting is a shared operation and extraction is partly shared, but in the rest
of the process the resources are dedicated to either liquids or instants. Liquids use one of the
extraction batteries. The liquid production is given priority on this battery. That, in combination
with the buffer between roasting and extraction, made it possible to restrict the case study to the
liquids. Liquids are produced in about 10 different blends. Packaging increases the variety
drastically to (about) 50 stock keeping units (sku). The customers are the Sara Lee operating
companies (Opco) all over the world. There are about 20 Opco’s. The largest Opco has 40% of
the turnover, the next one 10%. For the larger blends, almost all Opco’s have their own sku, for
smaller blends there are only few different sku’s. The largest blend has about 65% of the
turnover. The liquids are made-to-stock. For part of the Opco’s, the Opco stock is visible for the
supply network planning (SNP) of the plant and is integrated in their stock control. These are
called the “collaborating” Opco’s. Other Opco’s (non-collaborating Opco’s) give just orders.
These are the Opco’s with the smaller turnover. For these last Opco’s the demand can be rather
lumpy. The demand for some blends is seasonal, because part of the demand is for hotels and
restaurants. For one of the blends the high season demand can be more than three times the
average demand.
Figure 1: Material flow
Detailed process descriptions
The production step indicated as “extraction” in Figure 1, is in fact a rather complex process of
different production and storage steps. See Figure 2 for an overview.
Figure 2: Extraction phase