Counting the cost

Citation

(2006), "Counting the cost", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 55 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2006.07955bab.004

Counting the cost

Four years ago, a major produce packing company approached Bruce Welt, coordinator of the University of Florida’s Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department’s Packaging Science program to see if Welt’s team could develop a way to measure the productivity of the company’s packers. The vendor wanted to establish an incentive program to reward its most productive workers, but did not have a means of knowing how many boxes of fruit or vegetables each worker was packing per day.

Following an unsuccessful (but very useful) bar-cose based pilot, Welt and his team have partnered with Intelletto, an Ontario provider of RFID equipment to produce a system called Gatorpacker, combining bar code and RFID data.

Each packer will be assigned a stack of reusable passive RFID tags, to which their unique ID has been encoded. As a worker packs a reusable plastic tote, he or she will slip a tag into a pouch on the side of the tote. All totes each packer uses have bar code labels already attached to them for identifying the contents.

As a full tote travels down a conveyor, a bar code scanner will read the bar code label. Next, an RFID interrogator will read the tag in the tote’s sleeve. This data will tell the company how many boxes each worker produces and be used as the basis of a productivity-based incentive payment system.

For more information, see www.intelletto.com/