The Karsten Group, one of South Africa’s largest growers, packers and exporters of grapes, is the latest company to reap the benefits of packhouse profitability specialist Marco's Yield Control System (YCM), which is installed at their packhouse near Koneneiland.
According to the group, Marco's YCM deskills the packing process and ensures punnets are maintained within very close tolerances. As they pass down the packing line, the weights of pre-packed punnets are individually checked at the YCM workstations, staggered either side of the line, to see if they are underweight, overweight or within tolerance. The operatives then adjust punnets accordingly by adding or removing fruit.
'Although only recently commissioned, the multi-station system is already bringing significant improvements to the grape packing line, reducing over-pack (giveaway), improving productivity and reducing labour overheads,' said group director Pieter Karsten Jnr. 'Collectively this is contributing directly to our bottom line profitability and is expected to provide a return on investment within four to six months.'
The YCM features a simple coloured vertical bargraph, which provides pack operatives with a purely visual indication of the weight status of individual punnets, with red/amber lights indicating out of tolerance. In-tolerance punnets are clearly indicated with the central green lights illuminating and once operatives tune into this simple coloured light system, checking and adjusting each punnet takes only a matter of seconds.
A key feature of the YCM is the innovative automatic optimisation (AO) software, which constantly monitors individual packer’s punnet weight trends. Based on this real time data, the software continually adjusts the target weights for each station within the preset tolerances to optimise ongoing punnet weights. The packers are unaware of these subtle changes and continue to pack according to the lights.
The result is that punnets are continually packed within less than a gram of target weight.
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