Challenges:
- Characterizing the supply of powdered material (up to 40 tons/hour), identifying causes of delays, bottlenecks, and opportunities for increasing production.
Solutions and Results:
- The sack supply process involved forklifts, hoists, operators, storage, elevators, hopper filling and emptying, and more.
- Documentation of subprocesses and measurement of operation times.
- Statistical model for estimating speeds, filling rates, emptying rates, transportation, and handling.
- Development of a predictive discrete event model for operations with random elements.
- Determination of resource utilization and buffer storage behavior at different movement stations.
- Proposed strategies to increase capacity, buffers, logistics, and loading/unloading procedures for elevators.
- Medellin, Colombia, 2022