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Customers and results

We've built models for more than 300 organizations since the early 1990s, from single packaging lines to national distribution networks. Here's what some of them said, and the studies we're able to publish.

In their own words

What customers said

“We leveraged the model to recommend solutions that saved $21.7M in inventory carrying costs and reduced transit time by 19%.”
Mike Keller, Network Analyst & Engineer, Union Pacific Railroad
“Instead of taking a snapshot, this is more like a video. Your ability to actually see the activity in action while the supply chain is running lets you understand impacts much better.”
Mike Geddis, Director of Engineering, General Mills
“The team went above and beyond the project scope, proactively brainstorming ways to make our project better.”
J. Adam Traina, Director of Operations Research, Symbotic
Organizations

A few of the 300+ we've built for

Food, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace and logistics. Most of this work stays confidential, so the published case studies below are a small share of it.

Case studies

Plants and lines

Each study states the decision, how it was modeled and what changed. They're hosted on reliasim.com, alongside the software used for most of them.

Validation · Food

Within 1% of measured OEE: a published validation

A peer-reviewed WSC 2020 model of a food plant matched a full year of measured OEE within one percentage point, failure mode by failure mode.

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Food · Capacity

Food plant capacity study at Bell-Carter

The pitting machines had two-hour changeovers and looked like the constraint. A capacity model found the real limits downstream in packaging.

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Food · Throughput

Spreadsheet vs. simulation at General Mills

Dynamic simulation replaced aggregate spreadsheet analysis of throughput. It ran six months of data in minutes, and the biggest gain came while building the model.

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Chemicals · Storage

Intermediate storage at Rohm and Haas

Modeling storage between the reactors and the bagging lines decoupled them and turned up low-capital growth options.

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CPG · Consolidation

Plant consolidation: a $4M retrofit avoided

A soap manufacturer found that one machine configuration would have caused a quality problem needing a $4 million retrofit. The model caught it before the plant was built.

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Food · Buffers

A decoupling buffer instead of a new line

A discrete rate model sized a storage step between a cereal plant's cookers and toasting ovens at 19.8% more effective production in peak periods, with no new capacity.

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Beverage · Expansion

Brewery expansion limited upstream

A craft brewery adding kegging and bottling learned that either line would overrun its fermenting and serving tanks unless capacity was added there first.

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Food & CPG · Scheduling

Two make-store-pack scheduling studies

At a coffee plant the bottleneck moved with pack format. At a CPG plant, reblend moved the in-process storage requirement, and that model was reused at 12+ factories.

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Food · Scale

Every configuration, every product

A food plant modeled every line in its current and future packing configurations and ran every product through them, about 30,000 simulation runs.

Read the study →

Supply chains and networks

Customers and partners have also written peer-reviewed papers about projects done with our tools. They're listed on the research page.

Have a line or network like these?

Tell us what you need to decide. We'll tell you whether a model can answer it and what data it would take.