Case Write-Up Group#15 Section 3

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National Cranberry Case Report TO 552 Team Name: Group 15 Authors: Adam Wydra, Brendan Biache, David Amorim, Srishti Sehgal Section: 03
To: Hugo Schaeffer From: Adam Wydra, Brendan Biache, David Amorim, Srishti Sehgal RE: RP#1 processing After conducting a thorough review of RP1, our team has identified key challenges and opportunities in the plant's operational capabilities. Solving these challenges will help reduce overtime expenses and improve relations with coop members by reducing truck waiting time. The reason for overtime is excess delays in the plant that lead to significant waiting time for trucks delivering and unloading cranberries. According to our analysis, the root cause of these delays is a critical bottleneck in plant operations: wet cranberry drying capacity. While the delivery rate of wet cranberries is at 1050 bbls per hour in a 12h period, drying capacity is only at 600 bbls per hour. Given a total wet storage capacity of 3200, approximately 6 hours and 45 minutes after the start of operations, trucks begin to wait for the plant to dry enough wet cranberries to allow for additional cranberries to be unloaded. After trucks finish arriving, trucks will have to wait an additional estimated 4 hours and 15 minutes past 7pm to finish unloading all cranberries. This results in over 16h of total unloading time, including the waiting time, and a total “waiting period” of 9.6 hours. The result is over 163 truck hours of waiting time and overtime pay as operations will conclude between 3am and 4am. The answer is in tackling the root cause - which is the process bottleneck found in the drying stage. By installing more dryers and increasing drying capacity, total throughput per hour will increase and ultimately will reduce total waiting time for truck deliveries. In addition, converting more dry bins to wet bins will further alleviate unloading strains as more trucks will be able to unload cranberries before having to wait for plant processing delays. Finally, as a secondary measure to improve plant profitability, we suggest installing a new light meter system to improve cranberry color grading. This new system will help the plant gain great precision in correctly grading cranberries and thus increasing the proportion of premium priced cranberries. While this will not directly affect the cost challenges mentioned above, it will improve the plant’s bottom line by increasing cranberry revenues. Please see below for a detailed analysis of the points mentioned above.
Supporting Analysis Causes of Delay As seen below, the drying stage is the first and main bottleneck (then followed by the separators). The calculations below are based on an hourly unloading of 1440 barrels of wet and dry cranberries (later broken down in the 75% and 25% distribution as per the case, respectively). 1440 barrels per hour was reached by dividing the total number of barrels by the 12h unloading period (7am to 7pm). RP1 Process Flow and Capacity/Utilization Analysis Wet Cranberry Inventory Build Up Diagram Wet bin capacity at RP1 will be reached in 6.67 hours (3200 bbl capacity divided by 480 bbl build up rate). By 7pm, trucks have finished arriving and, at this point, there is a total wet inventory build-up of 5760 bbls: 3200 in bins and 2560 in trucks that are waiting to unload. With a draw down (processing) rate of 600 bbls per hour (dryer bottleneck), it will take 4.27 hours (2560 bbls divided by 600 bbls/hr) for the waiting trucks to unload. Thus, total unloading (including waiting time) is 12h + 4.27h = 16.27h. This means that total waiting time per truck is 16.27h - 6.67h = 9.60h. By calculating the area of the smaller triangle below, we find total truck hours of waiting time: (9.6h x 2560 bbls)/2/75 bbls = 163.84.
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