The project was carried out in co-operation with ELVAL, one of the biggest aluminum rolling/sheeting companies worldwide. The work was part of a broader effort to increase production capacity and implementing a strategic shift towards high added value products. The foil department and its representative products were chosen for the study. The objective was to arrive at an optimum product mix on the basis of profit margin maximization and a shift towards high added value products over a 5 year period. Realistic operations and market data were used. The project methodology consisted of formulating several production scenarios for a 5 years period, and consecutively, analyzing them as a Linear Programming problem, using the Solver add-in of Excel. The team reached the general recommendation to shift the production towards a particular product category, and also proposed recommendations on complementary analysis methods such as Activity Based Costing and Risk Optimizer.
