Kverneland Group (Norway)

Grading pot plants during the production process, growing them in uniform groups in separate sections of a greenhouse, and tuning the growing conditions to the development stage of the “individual” plant will improve the efficiency of the production process, shorten the production cycle, lead to a uniform and higher quality of the marketable plants, create the possibility to harvest all plants in one operation, and facilitate production planning aimed at market demand. A model to simulate the logistics of grading Ficus benjamina pot plants was built with the simulation system software Arena. The development of the model proved to be a time-consuming task, but once it was built is was relatively simple to evaluate various conditions. The simulations revealed -for the given situation - that the capacity of the transportation means forms the bottleneck for most processes and for most pot sizes. The critical factor for packaging is formed by the number of people involved. Grading during the production cycle results in a reduction of the duration of the different processes, while the number of people necessary to carry out the tasks within the processes remains unchanged. This combination leads to a reduced labor requirement. During the conference a visualization of the model will be demonstrated.