National Craberry Cooperative

Preliminary Analysis

Although there was an initial investment in the unloading area of Receiving Plant 1 (RP1), there are still issues with both unloading wait times and rampant overtime usage. As the owners, the growers expect a high performance, lower cost, and decreasing lead time throughout the process. The process fruit operation at RP1 has many facets that must work in tandem to provide the quality and quantity we expect.

The most visible issue seen in the process is the wait time. As such, the first attempt at fixing the problem was focused on the receiving area. In reality, this was just a symptom of the issue. Although there are many areas of concern, I believe that addressing issues at the major bottleneck in the drying process would help alleviate the issue. This solution alone, however, would only push the bottleneck further down the process into the quality separation area. Only by addressing these two areas, would the best benefit to the cooperative be achieved. Through an analysis of the process (see Attachments 1a, 1b, 1c), one can visually deduce that there are several areas for focus.

The cranberry industry as a whole is shifting focus to a ‘wet harvest’ oriented approach. This can be seen by the year over year increase in wet berry production. This increase is in response to the acreage freeze imposed by governmental acts. Since the groups cannot cultivate more land, they must opt for the more efficient harvesting methods of wet harvesting (up to 20% greater quantity over dry harvesting).

Proposed Process Improvements

In light of the processes at the root cause of the backlog seen visually in the receiving area, distinct focus should be placed on the bottleneck areas of Drying and Quality Grading.

The processing rate of the dryers is noted as 600 bbls per hour. At this rate of flow there will be an equivalent distribution of wet and dry berries at the separator, which has a capacity of 1200 bbls per hour. Adding another dryer to this...