National Cranberry Process Recommendations

National Cranberry Process Recommendations

        One of the most glaring problems facing National Cranberry Cooperative (NCC)’s receiving plant #1 (RP1) is that they are losing money due to wrongly categorized cranberries. In 1995, the $1.50 premium was paid out over 450,000 barrels (bbls) of cranberries, when only approximately 225,000 were actually No. 3 quality. Also, the current truck transportation is a logistical challenge. There is an inefficiency found in the long-term backup of trucks waiting to drop off deliveries of berries.

If the goal is to increase production, a set schedule of driver cranberry deliveries needs to be developed. Also, an important question is whether wet harvesting or dry harvesting is going to increase over time. Hugo Schaeffer expects the wet harvest process cranberries to increase 70%, but the delivery log from September 23, 1995 shows the exact opposite, with dry harvested process cranberries making up 58% of the harvest. For the expected increase in wet harvest, more dryers will be needed as well as more storage bins. Given this assumption, if the wet harvest from 1995 produced 353,907 barrels of cranberries, a 70% increase would result in 601,642 cranberries being produced in 1996.

Wet berry product requires the use of dryers. In this process train, the dryers are the largest bottleneck. At least 6 more dryers would need to be purchased, and 10 of the exclusively dry bins would need to be converted to wet storage to eliminate the trucking delivery delays. This would quickly cause the conveyors to become the new bottleneck. Because the conveyors move both wet and dry berries, the increased wet production will cause the dry berries to begin to back up. 3 additional conveyors should also be purchased to maintain the dry berry throughput.

The attached process flow diagram (Exhibit 1) shows the cranberry process. This process begins with the original receiving of process berries and ends with the secondary qualification by the Bailey Mills. It also includes the delivery sub-process (testing, determining payment to grower, and beginning berry classification). Both wet and dry berries go through the same process up until their move to the first level of the plant on conveyor belts. For readability and simplicity, single inventory lines were used.

Table 1 (given below) shows the capacity in barrels per hour for each process. In regards to total barrels per hour, the bottleneck occurs in the Drying Unit. The Drying Unit can only handle 600 barrels per hour.

Table 1: Capacity in barrels per hour of each process step.

A model was created to simulate a peak harvest day using ______ (exhibit _____). 18,000 barrels were delivered over the course of 12 hours. Shipments were divided into 3 shipments every ten minutes: a wet cranberry shipment of 75 barrels, a wet cranberry shipment of 100 barrels., then a dry cranberry shipment of 75 barrels. Over the course of 12 hours, this ensures that trucks deliver 18,000 barrels over the course of twelve hours with 70% of the cranberries being wet.