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- Colleague Leunette talks about our mechanisation
Leunette talks about our mechanisation
We are constantly moving the business forward, such as with the mechanisation of our operating processes. The reason why we as a company are mechanising is in order to be make our work together more pleasant in order to ultimately be an even better and more reliable partner for you, the customer. Various mechanisation projects are currently being implemented. Our colleague Leunette provides an update. Leunette has been working at Heemskerk Flowers as a production worker for nearly 5 years, and now supervises part of our processing activities.
Could you tell us more about the conveyor belt mechanisation programme?
‘A conveyor belt carries an empty crate past the pick zones and is filled with flowers by the pickers. The flowers contained in the crate have the volume that fits in the AA box in which we ship our flowers to many countries. When the crate is full it is automatically transported to the packers. As soon as the packer registers the internal crate, the system will show the contents on a screen. The contents is checked and packed in the AA box. As soon as the lid is closed on the box, an address sticker is stuck on the box. This way of packing flowers into boxes is much better and faster. We have now been using this new system for a number of months and we are processing a lot more in a shorter space of time than with the old system. It is also easier to manage and simpler. There are far few missing products and errors, so the orders reach our customers better and more complete. We are also exploring how we can distribute the contents of the last box, which often consists of just a couple of bunches of flowers, between the preceding two boxes. We still need to come up with a good algorithm for that.
What other mechanisation are you working on?
We’ve started a pilot whereby the box loader first scans the box and then also scans the address list on the transporter (Danish trolley), so that there is a check that the right box is on the right trolley. This is going well and we are going to develop it further for the plants, so that every box/tray is linked to a Danish trolley. In theory a box can then no longer end up on the wrong trolley. This check program will run on a Google Glass, so that our colleagues have their hands free whilst loading the trolleys.