TU Delft Master Thesis Unimills
Robbert Zeemeijer Page 6 of 137 30-5-2007
Summary
This master thesis was done at Unimills B.V. Zwijndrecht, a company that produces
vegetable oil. In 2002 Unimills was sold by Unilever to the Malaysian company Golden Hope. Due to this takeover and changing customer demands, Unimills has to deal with three issues:
1. Unimills changed their strategy from producing commodities to stock, to producing specialties to order.
2. Unimills has to change from a company where making profit wasn't the main objective, to a company whose main concern is making profit.
3. After Unimills wasn’t part of Unilever any more, they had to setup their own IT- environment while nobody within Unimills had the knowledge of the overall
functionality of the IT-systems and the available information or information needs. To see if these issues were causing problems a process mapping was done during this thesis. After the process mapping the conclusion could be drawn that the change from commodities to special products is causing a lot of problems within the company. Especially the planning is causing a lot of problems which affect all processes.
After the process mapping the main question became:
“Is Unimills ready for the future, in case the production of commodities will become more en more replaced by production of specialties?”
To answer this question a simulation tool was designed. After verification and validation four possible future scenarios were simulated with this simulation tool. These scenarios were:
What is the effect of the implementation of a second fractionation plant? What is the effect of a doubled demand for blended products
What is the effect of 2 extra blending tanks?
What is the effect of 10 extra storage tanks in the ATL?
Simulating these four scenarios the following conclusions can be drawn: The placement of a second fractionation line has two effects :
o Unimills is more self supporting due to the production of stearin
o Unimills will have to store or sell a lot of by-product (olein) which can lead to storage shortness in the intermediate storage.
