Food production demands smart planning: DUALIS delivers GANTTPLAN

Balancing shelf life, hygiene standards, and product variety

• Automated planning for food products with short shelf lives and high variety
• Considers all production constraints, including best-before dates, hygiene requirements, and recipe changes
• Multi-resource planning for optimal utilization and minimized downtime
• Real-time transparency into inventory, bottlenecks, and production progress
• Scenario planning to evaluate alternative strategies

Dresden, July 30, 2025 – Food must be produced quickly, processed safely, and delivered on time – and all this under increasingly complex conditions. This requires precise, forward-looking, and above all automated production planning. Anyone still planning with Excel and experience values today risks rejects, delivery bottlenecks, and high costs. The GANTTPLAN planning software from DUALIS provides a solution: it enables flexible scheduling of production orders, efficient utilization of resources, and automatic consideration of all production restrictions.

When a product has a shelf life of just a few days, every step in the process – from receiving raw materials to final delivery – must run without delay. Whether it’s fresh goods, short shelf lives, strict hygiene standards, or constantly changing recipes, food production is more dynamic and demanding than ever. The growing variety of products and smaller batch sizes make planning especially challenging. On top of that, short-term disruptions like raw material shortages or fluctuating shelf life dates add further complexity.

“Even minor delays – and especially unplanned downtime – can directly impact quality, traceability, and delivery reliability. Planning mistakes can quickly lead to serious consequences. That’s why it’s essential to identify bottlenecks early, synchronize processes, and adjust plans in real time,” explains Heike Wilson, Managing Director of DUALIS GmbH IT Solution.

Multi-Resource Planning – Flexible despite numerous influencing factors

Consistent planning is essential. The APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) solution GANTTPLAN from DUALIS supports this with automated multi-resource planning. The system accounts for all relevant constraints, including minimum shelf life dates, and integrates them directly into the scheduling process. At the same time, it provides full transparency across the supply chain—covering raw materials, auxiliary materials, and packaging stocks. This ensures that only approved, quality-tested batches are used in production.

Resource conservation is also becoming increasingly important – not only for ecological reasons but also for economic efficiency. GANTTPLAN APS supports this through features such as bottleneck management for intermediate products, capacity smoothing during seasonal peaks, and demand-driven scheduling. These capabilities help prevent overproduction. Rolling sales forecasts allow various scenarios to be simulated and evaluated. The system shows in real time how alternative strategies impact setup times and inventory levels.

With GANTTPLAN APS, production planning is based on actual available resources and capacities, along with individually defined parameters and target values. Production orders can be scheduled, moved, fixed, or released – either automatically or manually – via the graphical control station. Plant utilization can be viewed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Deviations from the plan are immediately visible, and feedback from production is automatically integrated into the planning process.

“This allows companies to remain operational even in the face of short-term changes or machine failures,” says Heike Wilson, Managing Director of DUALIS GmbH IT Solution. “At the same time, GANTTPLAN significantly reduces planning effort and costs—freeing up time for strategic planning tasks.”