UPSCALING PRODUCTION WITHOUT UPSCALING FACILITY
In certain industries, space is often the greatest challenge in achieving growth. In a manufacturing facility, space will often be at a premium and the option of completely uprooting to a new, larger site would be unthinkable for many. Luckily, nowadays, there are solutions that allow poultry processors to upscale production without having to upscale their facility.
Take Faccenda Foods for example, its chicken processing plant has recently benefited from a flexible and space-saving solution – which not only increased productivity and improve throughput, but also reduced giveaway.
A small change but a big difference
Faccenda’s poultry line weighs and packages chicken legs and drumsticks using a screw feeder multihead weigher. This kit features the circular layout most of us know and love. There is, however, a small difference. Instead of radial feeders that are traditionally used, it incorporates rotating corkscrews – providing powerful and controlled feed to the hoppers.
The weighers are cleverly combined with Rotobatchers which accurately weigh portions of product and dispatch to a series of packing stations. Another important point to mention here is that the Rotobatchers are positioned directly beneath the weigher – a great space saving trick.
The design of this poultry line has helped Faccenda maximise the use of space within its chicken processing plant and has created a highly efficient layout for the legs and drumstick operation.
Greater flexibility
There are now four combinations placed closely together in a square configuration, catering for both the chicken legs and drumsticks. Two of the screw feeder weighers incorporate five litre hoppers to deal with whole legs, and the other two weighers incorporate three litre hoppers for the smaller drumsticks. This has delivered a flexible packaging operation that has proven results.
Since replacing a belt grading and packaging system, the new process has delivered a 30 percent reduction in giveaway. Overall throughput has improved by around 25 percent, with each operator now able to handle around 3.5kg of product per minute, compared to 2.8kg with the previous system – not bad by anyone’s standards!
Those are numbers you just can’t argue with. So don’t lose sleep over space as there are ways to work around it. With the combination of technology and a flexible approach, you too could achieve the same results.
I’d be happy to discuss how Ishida could apply space-saving solutions to your business, so please feel free to connect with me.
To find out more about how you can save more space and optimise your process at the same time, download our new white paper, The Poultry Processing Blueprint.