Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cranberry Answers #2 (Not Official)
Cranberry Answers #2 (Not Official)
The waiting time to unload at receiving is too long and inconsistent. Once
started, receiving is a 7 to 8 minute process, but the growers are upset as
their leased trucks with hired drivers are sitting idle for unknown periods of
time.
Overtime at the plant is out of control.
The berry grading process between numbers 2B and 3 berries is not accurate.
Whenever there is a close comparison as to whether a load is 2B or 3, the
chief berry receiver usually grades it a 3. In 1995 the number 3 berry
premium was $1.50 and was paid on about 450,000 bbls. It was found that
when the berries were used, only about half of them were number 3. This is a
considerable loss in terms of price paid.
There is not enough capacity for wet berries. There need to be more holding
bins.
Following business case discusses measures that can be adopted to cut wait times
for better serving of our growers, to help decide equipment purchase for increasing
capacity, to make the berry grading process more accurate as well as to cut
overtime for cost controlling.
The process flow diagram of the process fruit operation at NCC is as shown on the
next page.
3 National Cranberry Cooperative
Capacity calculation
Capacity of each process step is calculated in barrels per hour (bbls/hr). Please refer
appendix page for detailed calculations.
Dechaffing Drying
2 units 3 dryers
3000 bbls/hr 600 bbls/hr
Receiving Separator
5 dumpers 3 lines
3000 1200bbls/hr
bbls/hr
Destoning Dechaffing
3 units 1 unit
Bottleneck identifi cation 4500 bbls/hr 1500 bbls/hr
It was observed that on a peak harvest day RP1 receives 18,000 barrels of berries of
which 70% are wet harvested and 30% are dry. If we assume that the trucks arrive
uniformly over a period of 12 hours, the bottleneck could be identified by
calculating the implied utilization:
Assuming every batch of trucks arrive simultaneously, the last truck would
arrive at 7pm and wait 3.6 hours and unload at 10:40 pm.
Proposed changes
Add one dryer
It is evident from the above calculations that drying wet berries is a bottleneck.
Addition of one dryer would be beneficial as shown in these calculations.
One dryer addition will change flow rate to, 4 * 200 = 800 bbls/hr
In 12 hours, number of barrels processed = 12 * 800= 9600 bbls
6 National Cranberry Cooperative
Number of holding bins required to hold the last 2200 bbls of inventory
= 2200/250 = 8.8 ~= 9 bins.
The cost required for this conversion will be 9*10000 = $90,000.
Summary
In conclusion,
By adding one dryer instead of the holding bins, we would solve the
problem of the trucks waiting and also reduces the overtime costs
which would not be possible by just increasing the number of holding
bins.
In addition to the dryer, the light meter system would reduce losses
incurred by paying extra premium.
Appendix
Receiving:
Although the berries in the truck are sampled for weighing and color coding we shall
take the Kiwanee dumpers as the main equipment to calculate capacity at
receiving.
Wet Processing
Dry Processing
Separators