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Essay on National Cranberry Cooperative

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National Cranberry Cooperative In early 1981, at the National Cranberry Cooperative’s receiving plant number 1 (RP1), overtime costs are too high and delivery trucks and their drivers have to wait several hours to unload. The trucks have to wait because the plant’s holding bins fill up and there is not temporary storage. The holding bins fill up because within the cranberry operating system there is a bottleneck, a place in the production process where production slows down because of a slow or insufficient number of machines. This bottleneck is being caused by the lower relative capacity of the dryers. Relieving the bottleneck in the dryers by adding more dryers will allow the trucks to move through the dumping area more efficiently …show more content…

Adding the dryers will lower the time the cranberries spend in the dryers enough to relieve the bottleneck. (see exhibit 3)
• At 12,600 (70% of 18,000) wet barrels per day, the cranberries currently spend 21 hours a day in the dryers.
• Adding one dryer lowers the time in the dryers to 15.75 hours a day.
• Adding two dryers lowers the time in the dryers to 12.6 hours a day. Spending 12.6 hours in the dryers relieves the dryer bottleneck and the separator becomes the bottleneck. Long-term, RP1 should begin to look at how to relieve this next bottleneck. The time spent waiting for the holding bins to empty causes extra overtime. Simply adding in two new dryers will decrease this overtime. The 21 hours currently spent in the dryers will be decreased to 12.6 hours. However, the slowest process will then be the separator at 15 barrels per hour, so the throughput time is cut by (21-15=6) six hours. This results in an average of six overtime hours saved daily. Currently, there is no need to add holding bins. While the bottleneck is still located in the dryers, adding capacity in the holding bins will only cause the cranberries to wait in the bins longer and will not improve throughput time.
Purchasing two new dryers for the National Cranberry Cooperative’s receiving plant number 1 will reduce the wait time for trucks by speeding up the overall process. The quicker process will result in a reduction of overtime hours. The two new dryers will

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