Improving Fresh Fruit Bunches Unloading Process at Palm Oil Mills with Discrete-Event Simulation.

Palm oil industry is an important agricultural activity in Colombia. Agents of this industry have chosen associative strategies and vertical integrations to increase their efficiency. However, reducing logistics costs to compete with countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, is still a challenge, also due to the scarceness of applied research in the palm oil logistics processes. In this paper, we present a continuous-discrete simulation-based approach to evaluate and optimize the fresh fruit bunches unloading process at the mill. Two simulation models representing the current process and alternative process scenarios were developed and compared. The findings show that important improvements in waiting time and supplier satisfaction can be achieved without major investments.