What'sBest! Helps Welchs out of Jam When I was nine, we always had a jar of Welch's grape jelly in the house. Now, thirty-some years later, I have a nine year old son who practically lives on peanut butter and jelly. He'll eat what ever peanut butter brand happens to be on sale, but his jelly of choice is Welch's grape. Welch's products have been on the shelves and in the refrigerators of American homes for over 130 years. It takes more than just good jelly to stay on top of the family grocery list for generations. It takes good management. What'sBest! has been a helpful tool for the managers at Welch's. One area in which What'sBest! has been helpful is in materials management.

Every Fall, Welch's, the world's largest processor of Concord and Niagara grapes, presses about 300,000 tons of grapes a year into juice. Welch's then stores the juice in refrigerated tanks for use throughout the year in over 200 finished products including jellies, jams, concentrate, and bottled juice. Welch's then faces complex logistics in planning recipes for their retail products. They must decide how much concentrate to transfer between plants, whether to make the transfer by truck or rail, and which recipes to use for the major product groups.

Traditional Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) assumes infinite capacity without considering operational constraints and do not provide optimal cost solutions. Ed Schuster of Welch's and Stuart Allen of Penn State Erie developed and implemented a Capacitated Materials Requirement Planning Model (CMRP) to take care of these shortcomings. Schuster was Welch's corporate manager of operations planning and is now affiliated with MIT. The model, dubbed the Juice Logistics Model, was formulated as a linear programming model using What'sBest!.

"What'sBest! is a flexible and powerful tool to solve basic problems in operations management. It allows knowledgeable practitioners the ability to quickly produce models for everyday decision-making in business," Schuster remarked. "There is a gradual trend toward user-centeric software where practitioners design and implement their own mathematical models using tools at hand. For twenty years, we have employed this approach to meaningful advantage in solving increasingly complex problems such as capacitated material requirements planning in the process industries."

Schuster sees the What'sBest!/Excel modeling environment as an advantage in that it provides a natural interface for end users to see the benefits of management science and model building. "What'sBest! allows you to use the natural interface of the Excel spreadsheet to solve mathematical programming problems. We have not dealt with any linear programming problem that could not be efficiently solved with What'sBest!," Schuster explains. "The freedom of using a spreadsheet to formulate problems facilitates creative approaches not possible with many computer software packages."

The company ran the Juice Logistics Model monthly to provide senior management with information on the optimal logistics plan. Schuster concludes, "We have found that an investment in What's Best!, plus the knowledge and motivation to use management science for better decision-making, yields a great multiple in return on investment."

For general information on What'sBest!'s capabilities, visit our What'sBest! product page. You can download a demo version of What'sBest! from our download page or order a full blown version directly from our order page.