Modeling a garment manufacturer's cash flow using object-oriented simulation

Garment manufacturers usually work with a short vision of the demand to come in the following months. So they want to borrow as little as possible while still making a good profit at the end of the year. This study models a garment manufacturer's cash flow with the objective of finding scenarios where the company will be employing a low level of its credit-line and still be making a reasonable profit. To model our problem, we use Silk, an object-oriented simulation library in Java. Input data from a small-sized garment manufacturing company is used to build and test the model. A model where the manufacturer can test decisions like investing on opening new job shops, changing the production scheduling heuristics, or changing the payment agreements with suppliers and an example usage of the simulation are presented.