Cranberry Case
1. Write a brief summary of the case and key problems (10 points)
The case is about the process fruit operations of a receiving plant 1(RP1) at National Cranberry Cooperative (NCC). The NCC was an organization formed and owned by growers of cranberries to sell and market their products. The farmers bring their cranberries to the cooperative directly from their farms in leased trucks and get returns for their product from the cooperative. Over the years a trend was witnessed, the share of water harvested cranberries increased significantly. The NCC’s receiving plant started to see the problems caused by their limited plant capacity in 1995 where they spent $200000 to solve their problems yet they had to pay huge overtime costs to handle the large intake of cranberries. The overtime costs went out of control due to longer shifts for their resources to process the huge volume of cranberries. The key problem was the waiting time for the trucks at the dumping point to unload the trucks. The farmers used to lease the trucks at $100 per hour and had to pay for the idle time of their drivers. The growers were very upset with this inefficiency and delay. The NCC could not afford this problem as long as the growers were the owners of cooperative and the source of business to it. The root cause of the problems that RP1 faces is that there is no temporary space to store cranberries apart from holding bins. The waiting time for trucks builds up inventory at this point and the first activity that is dumping has to wait till the bins get empty. After Destoning and Dechaffing the drying activity and separators act as a bottleneck for the whole process. The holding bins are designed primarily to handle the dry berries in the existing infrastructure but recently the proportion of wet berries has increased and hence there is a shortage. In order to handle these problems the Vice President of operations at NCC calls a meeting with his assistant and Superintendent of plant. The
The case is about the process fruit operations of a receiving plant 1(RP1) at National Cranberry Cooperative (NCC). The NCC was an organization formed and owned by growers of cranberries to sell and market their products. The farmers bring their cranberries to the cooperative directly from their farms in leased trucks and get returns for their product from the cooperative. Over the years a trend was witnessed, the share of water harvested cranberries increased significantly. The NCC’s receiving plant started to see the problems caused by their limited plant capacity in 1995 where they spent $200000 to solve their problems yet they had to pay huge overtime costs to handle the large intake of cranberries. The overtime costs went out of control due to longer shifts for their resources to process the huge volume of cranberries. The key problem was the waiting time for the trucks at the dumping point to unload the trucks. The farmers used to lease the trucks at $100 per hour and had to pay for the idle time of their drivers. The growers were very upset with this inefficiency and delay. The NCC could not afford this problem as long as the growers were the owners of cooperative and the source of business to it. The root cause of the problems that RP1 faces is that there is no temporary space to store cranberries apart from holding bins. The waiting time for trucks builds up inventory at this point and the first activity that is dumping has to wait till the bins get empty. After Destoning and Dechaffing the drying activity and separators act as a bottleneck for the whole process. The holding bins are designed primarily to handle the dry berries in the existing infrastructure but recently the proportion of wet berries has increased and hence there is a shortage. In order to handle these problems the Vice President of operations at NCC calls a meeting with his assistant and Superintendent of plant. The