Allergen order, shelf life and washdowns: in the plan, not in someone’s head.
High-mix lines, a fixed allergen sequence, short-dated ingredients and a retailer who changes the order on Thursday for Monday. Orvixo holds every rule your plant runs on and re-solves the plan around each change: fewer wet cleans, less waste, orders shipped in full.
What makes food hard to plan
The allergen sequence is fixed
Plain before dairy before nut, on every line, every day. Break it and you owe a full wet clean, hours of shift capacity, or a recall. Most plants protect the sequence by planning conservatively and washing more than they need to.
Everything is dated
Ingredients age in the store. Finished goods age on the rack. Retailers demand a minimum remaining life at the dock. A run made a day early can be unsellable; a run made a day late is a short shipment.
The order book moves on Thursday
Promotions, weather and retailer amendments rewrite next week’s demand with two working days’ notice. The spreadsheet plan cannot absorb it; a person does, at the weekend.
Lines are shared, crews are certified
A line runs six formats; a format needs a trained crew; a crew works a shift pattern. The constraint is rarely the machine. It is who can be on it when.
Cleans are capacity too
Fillers, tanks and mixers have clean-in-place cycles with fixed durations and checks that must pass before the next batch. A line that is cleaning is not filling. Upstream, a mixer makes whole batches with a holding time, so a run is only as long as the batches that feed it.
Retailers score you
On-time-in-full below 97% costs margin in chargebacks and, repeated, the listing. Every plan is graded by someone else.
How Orvixo plans it
Allergen-aware sequencing
The allergen order for every line is a rule in the model. The solver groups runs by family so a wet clean happens only when the allergen actually changes, and never puts nut before dairy.
Shelf-life in the objective
Best-before dates on ingredients and finished goods are constraints. Oldest stock is used first; each SKU is made in the window that lands at the retailer with the life they require.
Re-solve on amendment
When the Monday order changes on Thursday, the plan re-solves in seconds: what moves, what is held, which washdown is saved, and whether anything ships short, before the pick slot.
Cleans placed, not counted
Clean-in-place cycles and washdowns sit in the plan with their real durations and the crew they need. Mixer batches and line runs come out of the same solve, so the line never waits on a batch and a batch never waits past its holding time.
People and formats together
Crew certifications and shift patterns are in the model, so the roster and the line plan come out of the same solve. Move a run to nights and the trained crew moves with it.
Planners publish
The plan proposes and explains. Your planners review and publish, or let Orvixo publish within the rules you set. Either way, the reasoning is on the record.
The ones your best planner already knows.
Written in plain language by your team, compiled by Orvixo into constraints the plan must respect. These are the ones we see in most food plants.
See it on your lines.
Talk us through how your plant plans today. We will show you where Orvixo would change it.