Modelling and Simulation, Mobile Solutions and Cloud Computing: A Solution for Intelligent Management of a Small and Medium-Sized Baking Business

Abstract

The sale of products during the pandemic by COVID-19 was severely affected. Several small businesses and industries have reduced their productivity or even closed down. As a result, companies that still survive this complicated period must rely on intelligent (but accessible) resources to guide their survival on the market. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an integrated and affordable tool, based on technologies such as mobile applications, Cloud Computing and discrete event simulation to guide small manufacturers in the bakery sector. The solution has a robust mobile application to control the inventory, sales and product prices (with customer records, prices and reports control). Its database is managed via cloud computing. However, the great contribution is the connection of this solution with a simulator based on Stochastic Timed Petri Nets, which is integrated with the mobile application through the cloud commuting. This tool manages to model and simulate each type of product, with its time and resources spent during the manufacturing process, with production hierarchy according to the production priority that the manufacturer requests. Its focus is the intelligent management and identification of bottlenecks and evaluation of production scenarios. In a practical application in a small real industry, in the middle of a pandemic period, it was possible to make optimizations that still keep the enterprise open, such as evaluations of equipment purchases, reassessment of processes (which yielded a 9% increase in productivity without any financial investment and just maintenance of some work positions) and readjustment of material purchases.