National Cranberry Cooperative

Anne Ross

MBA 624

July 9, 2017

Dr. Steven Gaa

Background

National Cranberry Cooperative (NCC) was an organization that was owned by cranberry growers where they could process and market their own berries. NCC was a large cooperation in North America and had operations in major growth areas in North America.  The cranberry harvest was doing very well however, there was a growing surplus of cranberries that were being produced compared to the actual utilization. Due to the cranberry surplus, an act was put in place to allow farmers the opportunity to control the size of their crops. The cranberries were harvested in two ways, water harvesting and dry harvesting. Water harvesting was becoming more popular mainly because the crops were easily harvested. The water process involved flooding the bogs and then mechanically shaking the the bushes where the berries would float to the service.  Overall, water harvesting resulted in 20 % more production than dry harvesting since this method involved handpicking and inspecting each berry one by one which was a long dragged out process.

At the receiving plant no.1 (RPI) the fresh fruit and process fruit operation were completely separate, it went from receiving, to inspecting to packing and delivering. The fresh fruit process experienced zero problems where the process fruit process involved several steps which lead to some of the problems that NCC was experiencing.

Problem Statement

There are several problems that NCC is faced with such as: overtimes costs, absenteeism, inefficient grading process, inefficient start times for workers, and bottleneck to unload fruit at process plant. National Cranberry Cooperative needs to find a way to create efficiencies for the production of cranberries during peaks in production, other wise a bottleneck will occur, causing delays and increased overtime costs.

Analysis

The peak season for cranberries is from September to December, which is much higher than the amount of cranberries harvested in the off-season. Since the amount of cranberries harvested is a lot higher, this poses a problem to RP1’s operational system. When holding bins are full the trucks have to wait which can cause a problem on the peak harvest days. During the peak season, the wait can be 8 hours or more. Purchasing more dryers will minimize the bottle neck which will minimize the wait time and cut the plants hours of operation.