Hexaly enhances Kaneka’s factory scheduling for smarter manufacturing
Kaneka Corporation is a global chemical manufacturer specializing in polymer and fermentation technologies, offering a diverse range of products that include chemical materials, food ingredients, and pharmaceutical solutions. These products aim to improve the quality of life and address environmental challenges. With a focus on innovation and sustainable development, Kaneka strives to contribute to society in both health and environmental terms.
To further increase operational efficiency and respond quickly to increasing demand and diversifying customer requirements, Kaneka turned to Hexaly’s optimization technology to improve its factory scheduling operations.
Dealing with increasingly complex scheduling issues
Kaneka operates a wide variety of businesses, including food processing, resin manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals, and each factory is required to create production schedules that take into account different equipment and constraints. Scheduling involves assigning tasks to equipment and personnel over time while satisfying all constraints, such as work order, equipment changeover, product changeover rules, personnel skills, tank capacity, and shipping deadlines. The challenge was to balance maximizing the utilization rate of machines and personnel with meeting customer demands.
Rapid and optimal scheduling with Hexaly
Hexaly enables the modeling of complex elements that are difficult to express directly with MILP solvers—such as lambda functions, nonlinear operators, interval decision variables, and list decision variables. By leveraging these capabilities, complex constraints can be modeled more easily. This has enabled rapid adoption in multiple business areas, such as food processing, resin manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals at Kaneka. Even in the first year of implementation, it has been deployed in multiple use cases, including weekly production plans at food processing plants, monthly production plans at resin manufacturing plants, inspection scheduling in pharmaceutical inspection processes, and optimal allocation plans for raw materials and products, achieving notable results.
Decisive factors for adoption and internal deployment
Kaneka appreciates the flexibility and processing performance of Hexaly’s modeling, and highly values the fact that in-house engineers can build and operate models themselves. With MILP-based modeling, it is challenging to accurately express real-world issues, as production sequences and production times must be represented, and objective functions must also be reduced to linear expressions. This often requires specialized knowledge and tuning, and Kaneka’s engineers found it difficult to implement and operate the system, which meant that the system could not be deployed in many businesses.
On the other hand, Hexaly makes it easier to build models, and even in-house engineers who have not received specialized training in optimization at Kaneka were able to build and operate models that align with practical applications. Additionally, Hexaly provides unlimited licenses to the Kaneka group, and the reasonable cost of company-wide deployment was also a key factor. Furthermore, with the support of the Hexaly support team, development proceeded smoothly, including the implementation of complex constraints and achieving practical calculation speeds. Kaneka is very satisfied with both the solution and the support.
Even when compared to the experienced planners at the factories where the Hexaly automation model was introduced, the Hexaly automation model has produced a variety of benefits, including several percent improvement in throughput, reduced inventory costs, and a system where planning tasks that previously took hours can now be completed in just a few minutes.
Kaneka currently positions Hexaly as a tool that can be deployed across the entire Kaneka group, and is working to train its in-house engineers and deploy it company-wide.
Hexaly is a great tool in the field of optimization. They have brought great results to our various businesses and have made a great contribution to the efficiency and sophistication of Kaneka's planning operations. Thank you for your great performance. Your technical support has also been great, and you have provided us with timely advice. You are a reliable and encouraging partner.
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