French company latest to introduce Marco's Yield Control

The latest version of Marco’s YCM Yield Control system is bringing important and significant productivity improvements for French co-operative Solarenn at their tomato packhouse near Rennes in north west France. Formed over 60 years ago, Solarenn is a cooperative of around 30 Breton market gardeners, producing eight different varieties of tomato, all of which are certified by Agri Confiance® and Tomates de France.

The YCM has a proven track record in reducing giveaway in the pre-packed fresh produce environment, whilst at the same time increasing pack house productivity by 30% or more. To simplify and deskill the packing process, a simple light array on the YCM weighing station shows the operator when the target weight is reached for each pack. This concept has now been developed further with Marco’s ‘one light–one fruit’ system where each light segment on the visual light display representing a single tomato. This feature significantly increases the speed of the packing process and is now is now a standard feature within the latest version of YCM.

The latest YCM provides packhouse managers with important dynamic data reporting, clearly highlighting individual operator performance in terms of packs per hour, average giveaway and also whether erroneous repeat weighing are occurring, as a result of operators attempting to weigh the same pack more than once to improve their productivity. This way the production managers have access to a full spectrum of data allowing them to make the right decision at the right time. Not only do they have full traceability of each and every operator, but the pack house manager can make decisions based on real live time data.

Solarenn’s manager Mr Rousse is very pleased with the installation and as he concludes: “The Marco system has made a tremendous difference to our pack house productivity and traceability. Our giveaway is now down to 3 % and we are seeing an uplift in packing speeds of around 30%. We were packing around 4.5 punnets a minute per operator and as soon as the install was finished we managed to reach 6 punnets a minute per operator. Our overall pack quality has improved and we have achieved a return on investment within the ten first months following the install. All of that is excellent news considering the complexity of our environment.”

If you would like to learn more about Marco, please visit them at Fruit Logistica in Berlin at Hall 3.1, Stand C-12.

For more information:
Becky Hart
Marco Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 1732 782380
Email: Becky.hart@marco.co.uk
www.marco.co.uk