Planta Alimentaria

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation for Spanish vocational training (Formacion Profesional, grado superior), module 0466 Organizacion de la produccion alimentaria of the Tecnico Superior en Procesos y Calidad en la Industria Alimentaria.

You are Nerea Somalo, the new production technician of Elaborados Valdeiregua S.L., a fictional chilled-soup and sauce plant of Albelda de Iregua (La Rioja) with 74 people and two filling lines, and the plant manager asks you to programme the summer campaign over 24 weeks, from March to August 2028.

The lines lose 26 of their 80 hours a week to format changes, allergen cleaning and breakdowns: an OEE of 54%, 73,526 packs a week while the summer asks for 126,000. The plant leaves 19% of the demand unserved and earns a margin below 1%.

Round by round you decide two things: the master plan and the shifts; the sequence of recipes and formats and how the changes are done; maintenance and the campaign purchases; and how to answer a heatwave promotion and a pasteuriser that ran below its critical limit. Each week the capacity, the OEE, the stock within its shelf life, the service failures, the packs destroyed and the result are recomputed.

Each round is scored on the result improvement over 24 weeks, the OEE, the service failures and the unit cost, with the margin, the stock, the packs destroyed and the changes shown but not scored. Allergen recipes run without the validated cleaning or a lot released after its critical control point failed cap the score. Spanish with English.

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.