Model analysis of two European markets at Lhoist

Details

Supervisors

Chevalier, Philippe

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en Ingénieur de gestion

Abstract

The following thesis copes with the analysis of the two different markets encountered during the internship at Lhoist. It presents the context, the presentation of the program used during my internship, a practical example and recommendations to improve Lhoist’s models. The two situation encountered were completely different in terms of priority at Lhoist: an under capacitated network and an over capacitated network. Of course, the under capacitated market was the one Lhoist has driven more attention to in the short term. Even if the situations were quite different, we applied the same logic to create short-term, long term and improvement scenarios in both cases. We will first briefly introduce Lhoist, its history, its main market and its product classification. We shall then present their production process and classify their particular flow of goods. The program OMP+ is then presented and the scope of the project in terms of time horizon and problem definition. Then, we present our example. The data presented in our example aren’t representative of what we encountered at Lhoist. Indeed, due to a confidential agreement, we aren’t allowed to show the results of our internship or realistic data which could be related to the industrial world. However, the example we have created from scratch has the purpose to replicate different situations that have driven our attention. We then explain practically how we have implemented the data into the program for both our internship and our example. We shall analyze the so-called ‘reference situation’ and then optimize the example to highlight the different effects and in which sequence the program optimizes. The different recommendations presented as hypothesis will complete our example. We will try to validate our thoughts about the different situations encountered. Those are: - The incomplete network available at Lhoist due to a lack of information or specific constraints (quality requirements, logistics or customer driven decisions) is restricting the flexibility of the models; - The possibility of backhauls in the network and the potential benefits of improving the logistics are a good economic factors to improve the overall costs; - The production different types of products sharing the same machines (and the capacities) in a single-product model should be upgraded to a multi-product model; - The reporting of the lost sales in a cost minimization environment implemented at Lhoist is not optimal (versus the profit maximization potential improvement); and - The possibility to make stocks under certain conditions for all customers (not only the export customers) should be investigated.