Marco, the productivity improvement experts, have been conducting extensive worldwide pack house trials. These trials have revealed some interesting and widespread themes, especially concerning the difficulties in managing large labour forces.
Marco have found that there is on average a 300% difference in performance between the best and worst operator in a pack house that is manually packing fresh produce. Naturally, the aspiration is to have all operators performing at the level associated with the best of the team but unless you are measuring this consistently and accurately it is impossible to drive improvement. If you know who are your best operators it allows you the opportunity to cross train their skills to the poorer performers, ratcheting up the overall productivity.
By implementing a yield control system, which de-skills the manual packing process, and closely monitors operator’s performance, this discrepancy will be reduced to only 30%. In practice, this means that packs will be more uniform in both appearance and weight, and operator’s packing speeds will be more consistent and faster, meaning output will be easier to monitor and predict.
Another theme that has emerged from pack house trials is that of standard deviation. Where there is no monitoring system in place, standard deviation can be extremely high. Whilst the average weight across a selection of punnets might conform to what is expected, if the SD is very large, then the punnets themselves will be hugely inconsistent as they would vary massively in weight.
This could put a pack house under risk for non-compliance, and will be an indicator that there is significant over pack. Our trials have demonstrated a reduction in this standard deviation by up to three times when an effective pack house system was installed, bringing control and consistency to every pack weight, and so reducing the variance.
Marco will be offering help and advice on how to overcome these issues, at Asia Fruit Logistica, 2nd-4th September, stand B-07. To learn more, please contact.
