Craneberry

National Cranberry Cooperative

National Cranberry Cooperative was an organization formed and owned by growers of cranberries to process and markets their berries. Now, they have some problems. Although they bought a fifth dumper at RP1, their overtime cost still out of control and the prediction of waiting time of trucks to unload will keep higher.

1. What are the problems facing receiving plant NO.1?

Firstly, their trucks and drivers spend too much time waiting to unload process fruit at the receiving plant, and the overtime costs and absenteeism are out of control. There is another problem is that the chief berry receiver cannot classify best berry according to the color exactly. Almost half of the berries graded as No.3 was paid 50 cents premium per barrel, but they are not the best quality. So, NCC would lose the premium they have paid.

2. What are the sources of the variability that NCC is subjected to?

Look from the whole picture, the reason of the buildup of berries in NCC, especially when the truck drivers and those in the receiving area observed it, is the limited capacity of the dumps. NCC is subjected to another several variables fluctuate. In harvest-season day, the growers pick and transit berries to NCC randomly. As the Figure A shows, the harvesting period is from the beginning of September to the mid of December. But in the real world, the berry picked time is always from September to the end of November. The mount of berries picked daily is not so evenly and it always fluctuates dramatically. Moreover, the trucks arrive at NCC unscheduled. They did not cooperate with NCC and sometimes they waited in a long queue and sometimes would be no trucks. The most important major variability is the berries received picked by the wet-harvested. As we know that the water harvest would make growers get more berries but they were only credited for 85% of the scale weight of wet deliveries. It is a big problem for NCC to process them and they need to...