On What Is Important

I thought I would give all you processors a little feedback.

I've been talking with many of you, and thought I would compile a list of what I think will be your areas of focus and investment over the coming months, based on the current economic environment.

1) Yield. This might seem boring to some- haven't we focused on this long enough? The answer is no. Current state-of-the-art frozen potato lines produce only 700g of product per kilo of raw. Most lines produce less than 600g. Heck, 60g is lost in the peeling step alone! This facet is the easiest payback- reduce the amount of raw product you must buy in order to fulfill demand for your products. Easy money. Yes, we've spend lots squeezing things to get to where we are. But there is lots of room for improvement.

2) Elimination of foreign materials (FM). I wrote a fair bit about different technical aspects of this last spring: Look at my posts for April 30; May 9 and 17; June 3, 9 and 20; July 14. This has been an issue that has increased importance over the last year or two, based on my conversations with you all. Everyone wants to avoid product liability/recalls, and are interested in reduced downtime that can also result. Be sure to take in my presentation on the topic at the PPI Convention in Charlottetown, PEI (http://www.potatoconvention.com/) in June.

3) Reduction in dependence on skilled labor. This one is a bit less universal than the first two- some of you are still committed to the current model of support labor needed in a line. But labor, whether we like it or not, is increasingly expensive and difficult to acquire and retain. Few people want such menial jobs, and those who are willing to accept them tend toward transient in lifestyle- you just can't keep them in one place. We are working on automation to accomplish this, as I mention in my posts of last April 1, 9 and 22.

4) Product quality. Again, this is a bit more limited in applicability. Many products have similar quality specs that have remained unchanged for a long time; for those, the focus must be yield (while maintaining quality). But there are new products and new markets, some of which require nearly zero defect. For some of those, the normal processing line setup may not be sufficient to achieve needed quality. I wrote quite a bit about this last July 3, 19 and 22.

These are the areas I focus on, because I think they are most important to you. Let me know how you see things!

Tim

Stumble It!

Bookmark on del.icio.us