Marco reduce airfreight costs and improve productivity for Kenya fresh produce exporter
KHE is a major grower-exporter of premium and convenience fresh produce including runner beans, sugar snap peas, mange tout, leeks, baby corn and broccoli spears. The diversity of these products mandates manual packing procedures, usually relying on the dexterity of the operators to maintain pack weight consistency. However, given the varying sizes and the relatively small number of products per pack, minimising over-pack, whilst ensuring pack target weights are average weight compliant as per the Three Packers’ Rules, is a challenging task. Without adequate controls on the Packing procedure in such environments, over-pack is inevitable.
The Marco YCM systems solve these problems, deskilling manual fresh produce packing processes, reducing over-pack (giveaway) to fractions of a gram, improving productivity, reducing labour charges and increasing profits. Marco’s extensive experience with leading worldwide pack-houses demonstrates that payback times for such installations are usually within a few months, presenting negligible risks for such investments.
Improved pack weight consistency has another important bonus. Airfreight costs are a major overhead for fresh produce companies such as KHE, whose main markets are thousands of miles away. The Yield Control Modules (YCM) are now ensuring KHE do not paying ‘excess baggage charges’ for their packs of vegetables travelling to supermarkets across Europe. Freight charges are calculated on actually shipped weight so therefore 5% over-pack for instance, translates directly to 5% increase in freight charges. (Marco’s extensive experience shows that many pack-houses over-pack by more than 5%.)
The YCM features a simple coloured vertical bargraph, which provides pack operatives with a purely visual indication of the weight status of individual packs, with red/amber lights indicating out of tolerance. In-tolerance packs are clearly indicated with the central green lights illuminating.
A key feature of the YCM is the innovative automatic optimisation (AO) software, which constantly monitors individual packer’s pack weight trends. Based on this real time data, the software continually adjusts the target weights for each station within the preset tolerances to optimize ongoing pack weights. The packers are unaware of these subtle changes and continue to pack to the green lights.
This latest installation is a strong endorsement of the effectiveness of the Marco YCM systems and KHE’s Operations Manager Snehal Patel is delighted with the results: “The Marco systems have brought rapid and important improvements to our packing processes and we have had no hesitation in implementing this further investment. Operators find them very easy to use and the mobility of the stations means we can easily configure lines to meet rapidly changing order requirements. Our over-pack has reduced to almost zero and this is now becoming evident in our reduced airfreight costs.”
For more information:
Mandy Hart
Marco
www.marco.co.uk
[email protected]
