Sunday, May 27, 2012

How Automatic Systems Like Fruit Bin Dumpers Can Make Businesses More Productive

By Steve Vanderwoude


Business productivity can be decided by many factors. Some of these factors can be regulated while others can't. For instance, if you are a farmer, crop yield will be largely set by the weather you experience in a given growing cycle. The same might be accurate for a business in the seasonal tourism industry where in like manner an uncontrollable element like the weather can actually determine if your investment in resources to make the enterprise profitable will be a success or not.

For enterprises that handle commodities, a different set of productivity factors come into play. Most firms that handle commodities likely use equipment to handle, pack and ship their products. For these firms, the boundaries of production can largely be determined by how much equipment they invest in and also by the kind of equipment they use. Some firms will use more equipment than others because they think that the amortization costs of the equipment they invest in will be less than paying employees to do the same quantity of work. Other firms will depend more heavily on human resources because their labor costs are lower and therefore they cannot justify the cost of making an investment in equipment. Another major factor is the availability of laborers during the packing season.

A fine illustration of a business where production performance is largely decided by discovering the best balance between investment in machinery and investment in human resources is the apple industry. Apple packing plants heavily depend on some advanced items of equipment to increase productivity but they also are dependent on some well-trained employees to maximize productivity. So the real determining factor to making an apple packing plant productive is to put resources in the equipment which will best take advantage of the human resources. One extremely critical piece of equipment on an apple packing line is the bin dumper. Not only will this machine manage the production flow of the line, which can be up to 400 bins each day (at over 800 pounds per bin), nevertheless it can be crewed by one employee. Imagine that, one individual accountable for getting literally hundreds of thousands of apples onto a packing line everyday. Quality bin dumpers just like the one you can investigate here, also are very necessary for handling the apples carefully with little or no damages to the fruit. The above example does show how critical certain items of equipment can be to the over-all production performance of a fruit packing line.

Now it would be wonderful if all the apparatus on an apple line had a worker to production proportion like the bin dumper example discussed above. The truth is that there are also items of equipment on apple lines that require plenty of laborers to make the line productive. For instance, most apple packing lines also have high speed sorting machines that grade and sort the apples by size and color. Though the sorting and grading stages are completely automated, every size and grade of apple is directed to packing exits on the machine where they have all got to be hand packed into cartons.

At the end of the day, maximizing production is all about choosing the very best mix of non human and human resources. Nevertheless as shared in the example above, certain resources may have a much greater impact on productive output than others. It is exactly for this reason that enterprises that are serious about maximizing production efficiency actually need to invest resources in researching as many production-enhancing options as practicable prior to committing to a strategy.




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