Use Case

Constraint-Based Production Scheduling

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The Planning Challenge

Guerlain is a historic French luxury fragrance house founded in 1828 and part of the LVMH Group. The brand operates specialized perfume manufacturing sites in France supplying a global luxury market where product availability and quality consistency are critical to protecting brand reputation.

Perfume manufacturing combines long maturation cycles, strict quality requirements, and highly constrained production processes.

A key operational constraint lies in the use of production tanks, where manufacturing operations must occur in compatible vessels with limited availability.

As production flows expanded and workshop complexity increased, coordinating tank usage, sequencing production, and protecting manufacturing reliability became increasingly difficult.

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Results at a Glance

• 20% of production capacity freed through improved scheduling
• 160 tanks scheduled and monitored daily
• Improved visibility into manufacturing resource utilization
• More reliable shop-floor execution

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The Operational Environment

Guerlain’s perfume manufacturing operations combine complex production flows and strict quality requirements.

Its manufacturing environment includes:

• Tank-based production processes
• Long maceration and maturation cycles
• Multiple production stages feeding final packaging operations

In this environment, production scheduling decisions directly affect manufacturing reliability, product availability, and operational efficiency.

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The Transformation

Guerlain partnered with Sunstice to modernize how production scheduling decisions are managed across its manufacturing operations.

By introducing constraint-based scheduling and improving visibility into tank capacity and production constraints, planners gained greater control over sequencing decisions and production feasibility.

This enabled earlier detection of capacity saturation and more reliable production execution.

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Customer Perspective

“The solution allows us to anticipate significantly: peak loads, product launches, raw material supply, and workforce management. We now produce batch sizes aligned with our actual needs, without overstocking or unnecessarily saturating our tanks.”
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Thierry Bunot
Supply Chain Manager – Guerlain

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Structured Agility™ in Action

Guerlain’s transformation illustrates Structured Agility™, Sunstice’s operating framework for planning in highly constrained production environments.

By improving how production schedules anticipate capacity constraints and coordinate manufacturing flows, Guerlain gained stronger control over complex production resources.

Production plans can now adapt more effectively to operational variability while maintaining manufacturing reliability.