🔍 Article co-created with Ángel Gonell, Operations Director at Diesco Industries República Dominicana (🇩🇴 Dominican Republic), and Augusto Unzaga, host of Keru Podcast.
🎙️ This article was inspired by Episode 26 of Keru Podcast.
Keru Podcast, created by Globalita.io, is a series of conversations (in Spanish) with industrial leaders from Latin America about management, technology and decision-making in complex environments.
Manufacturing with what you have: the island dilemma
In the Dominican Republic, leading a bottling plant such as Agua Crystal or Alaska, part of the Diesco Industries Dominican Republic holding, means making decisions under a structural constraint: operating on an island with limited logistics windows. This turns operations planning in complex supply environments into an act of constant anticipation, where not planning is not just costly: it is unfeasible.
Ángel Gonell Dominican Republic sums it up with absolute operational clarity:
“If an input doesn’t arrive on time, it’s not that you lose efficiency. It’s that you can’t produce.”
The island location turns supply into a system with a low margin for error: ships don’t arrive every day, customs processes require prior validation, and international suppliers don’t always understand how critical the local production pace is. In this context, efficiency is not measured only by inventory reduction or product turnover: it is measured by the ability to foresee. And to prevent.
This means redesigning the way buffers, lead times and the relationship with suppliers are understood. The “just-in-time” model, ideal for factories with immediate land connections, loses its meaning here. Planning must work under a just-in-case logic, especially when it comes to key materials such as caps, labels, bottles or inputs for ice.
“Having inventory is not a luxury, it’s a way to sleep at night,” says Gonell with a smile that holds logistics and accumulated stress.
But not everything is solved by stockpiling. Logistics inventory optimization in this environment requires classifying risks, prioritizing critical inputs, building scenario simulations and, above all, aligning internal mindsets with a culture of foresight.
Planning to withstand: how to supply with no margin for error
In logistics environments as restrictive as an island, operations planning becomes a strategic discipline. Calculating needs is not enough: you have to anticipate what you don’t see coming. For Ángel Gonell Diesco Industries, that was the starting point of a deep cultural change.
“Here you don’t plan to be more efficient. You plan to survive.”
The plant under his leadership operates with high production frequency, fast-moving products such as bottled water and ice, and demand that gives no respite even in the low season. If supply fails, there is no land-based supplier that can cover a shortage within 24 hours. That is why designing smart buffers became a priority.
Logistics risk classification: how expensive is it not to have it
One of the first steps Gonell’s team took was to redefine their inventories not only by volume or turnover, but by logistics criticality. Instead of a traditional ABC classification, they introduced a two-way matrix: by operational impact and by exposure to external risk. This gave rise to new categories:
- Unpredictable critical items: imported inputs with no alternative supplier and a lead time of more than 30 days.
- Predictable critical items: high-turnover materials but with regional availability.
- Non-critical items: any input that is substitutable or has a low impact on daily production.
This logic made it possible to apply a Just-In-Case approach without oversizing the entire warehouse. Only what was truly irreplaceable deserved extended coverage. Everything else had to be kept tight and with high turnover.
This practice is aligned with the principles of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), where demand and supply are periodically matched to align capacity, inventory and real needs. In Diesco’s case, S&OP was strengthened as a monthly routine with cross-functional participation: production, logistics, purchasing, sales and maintenance.
The team’s role: turning foresight into culture
For the system to work, processes are not enough: it takes a mindset. Ángel Gonell Dominican Republic insists that planning is not the job of the purchasing area or the central planner. It is a company culture. And as such, it is trained.
“An operator who reports an anomaly on a label is not reporting a problem. They are protecting supply.”
Under this logic, visual boards with supply traffic lights per line were implemented, along with internal alerts for inputs with less than 10 days of coverage, and specific training on the financial and operational impact of a stoppage due to a missing input.
This approach connects with the Policy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) system, which seeks to align strategy with the daily actions of all levels. When each area understands how its action or omission affects supply, foresight becomes routine.
Replenishing from the ship: redesigning the Kanban model
One of the plant’s greatest achievements was adapting the Kanban system to the real conditions of maritime supply. Traditionally, Kanban is used to replenish based on consumption: when a tray is emptied, another one is ordered. But in an island context, that is too late.
Gonell and his team designed an advance import Kanban, where the replenishment signal is not physical consumption, but the intersection of projected consumption and effective lead time plus a contingency window. In practice, this meant ordering while there is still stock, but calibrated so as not to oversize.
“Our Kanban doesn’t react. It anticipates.”
In addition, the signal system was digitized with dashboards shared between purchasing, logistics and the warehouse, which made it possible to integrate decisions with suppliers and anticipate customs bottlenecks.
This redesign was based on Lean Manufacturing principles, especially on the axis of operational visibility and reaction without waste. But adapted to the context: without logistics flexibility, the only solution is greater internal foresight.
From the ship to the customer: keeping pace with limited local transportation
Not all challenges come from the ocean. Once the inputs arrive, they have to be moved. In the Dominican Republic, local transportation also imposes constraints: delivery schedules, fleet capacity and hard-to-reach routes. This forced the team to think not only about how to plan the container’s arrival, but also its unloading, internal transfer and effective consumption at the plant.
To solve this, a model of receiving slots and sequencing by operational urgency was implemented, in which each unloading is scheduled according to actual consumption and the criticality of the input. The warehouse stopped operating with a “first in, first out” logic and moved to a “most critical, first processed” logic.
The result was a reduction of up to 70% in cases of line stoppages due to internal logistics disorganization.
Final reflection
Operations planning in complex supply environments is not about having everything under control, but about anticipating what can fail… and designing to withstand it. Ángel Gonell Diesco Industries showed that even with physical limitations —ports, ships, foreign inputs— it is possible to build a robust industrial system by combining method, culture and preventive leadership.
Planning is not just projecting figures: it is preparing the organization to respond without collapsing. And that, in an island environment, makes the difference between producing… or stopping.
🔁 Keru is a podcast created by Globalita.io, where we talk with those who lead Latin American industry from the inside.
Is your system ready to operate… when everything is running late?
Industrial Engineer with more than 20 years of experience in operations, manufacturing and quality in the beverage, food, medical device and textile sectors. He has led multisite plants with more than 900 employees, managing the production, maintenance, logistics and planning areas. He stands out in the implementation of world-class systems such as SAP, ISO, HACCP and Lean Manufacturing, achieving significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements. His career includes leadership positions at Diesco Industries, Sealy, Vinícola del Norte, Casa Brugal, Fresenius Kabi and Grupo M & Codevi, establishing himself as a reference in integrated management of industrial operations
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