Orica is one of the leading publicly-owned companies in Australia, with operations in around 50 countries and customers in twice that many. Orica has evolved from a supplier of explosives to the Victorian gold fields in 19th Century Australia into a multi-billion dollar company that is currently ranked as one of the top 40 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange based on market capitalization.

Orica's Explosives division is organized in 3 geographical regions: Asia/Pacific, North America and Latin America.

As part of its strategic planning efforts, the division was searching for a network optimization tool capable of modeling the entire explosives industry at the regional level and able to accommodate the differences between the 3 regions.

The goal was to use the tool to evaluate medium and long term regional strategies, including the expansion of existing facilities and/or the acquisition of new ones.

Orica was under quite tight timing restrictions, and we were able to develop the model and implement the solution in a matter of weeks. The model incorporates costing and related restrictions very specific to the Explosives industry, and allows each region to model the entire market and evaluate alternate growth and profitability strategies.