Yield Control Manager

Initially developed for Pack-houses to manage the high speed manual packing of stoned and soft fruits, it delivers significant benefits and cost savings for this highly competitive industry by maximising yield and minimising giveaway.

Despite significant advances in process and packaging automation technology, fruit packing is still reliant on the dexterity of the manual packers to ensure rapid yet careful packing. By their nature the fruits vary in size, shape and of course weight, complicating the packing process. To maintain competitiveness, speed is of the essence, but companies have to comply with The Packers' Code for 'e' weighing, whilst ensuring the highest quality and minimising giveaway. Even a few grams giveaway in each pack amounts to significant losses over a growing season.

TRAC-IT YCM overcomes these traditional manual packing shortcomings. It safeguards your products' technical specifications and provides far greater consistency for your packaged products by ensuring all the essential line components are controlled in real time.
BENEFITS

The Yield Control Module:

Dramatically reduces giveaway

Enables individual operator performance analysis

Ensures product technical specification adherence

Delivers traceability and control by providing real time electronic data

The required target weights for a particular run are automatically sent to each of the LineMaster workstations on the line. This reduces set up and changeover times, thereby increasing efficiency and eliminating the potential error of an incorrect target weight which results in costly product wastage.

TRAC-IT YCM monitors the total quantity of product allocated to the line and reconciles this with the actual usage recorded at each of the workstations, together with any waste. From this information it automatically produces accurate yield data over user-defined periods by batch run and total production.

TRAC-IT YCM incorporates our inspirational Automatic Optimisation (AO). AO treats each operator as an individual 'filling machine,' constantly monitoring their pack weight trends. For those operators who pack consistently at either end of the pack weight tolerance zone, AO applies an adjustment in order to guarantee the tightest possible control. This results in a sustained reduction in giveaway and ensures greater consistency for every batch packed.

All these adjustments are totally transparent to the operator who simply packs to the 'green for go' traffic light display.

We have shown time and time again that customers using our Trac-IT YCM Pack-house solution can virtually eradicate giveaway, without any impact on packing speeds.

Actual example of the cost savings achieved:
A Strawberry Pack-house in Scotland: This installation regularly packs 40 tons of fruit per week and achieved a saving of 2,000 kg per week. At £2 per kg, savings equate to £4,000 per week or £200,000 per annum!

How will this protect my profit margins and increase efficiency?


It is vital during multi component product make up, that each of the components is measured out to the exact weight specification.

YCM can be configured to work in conjunction with DEM, to import the planned orders for a line. The target component weights are automatically set to each of the LineMaster scales, reducing set up and changeover times to increase efficiency, eliminating the potential error and creation of waste.

YCM monitors the mass balance of product allocated to the line, and reconciles this with the actual usage recorded over the scales combined with waste, to produce accurate yield data by batch run and total production, over user defined periods.

This performance reporting is extended to the efficiency, and weighing accuracy achieved by each individual packer.

HARDWARE

LineMaster Workstation
DataMaster Terminal
Handheld PC / Peripherals
SOFTWARE