Australian fresh food production company Moraitis Fresh uses radio frequency identification (RFID) to increase productivity and promote relationships with retailers
chrispeng [ad_1]
customer: Moraitis Fresh Food Production Company
Introduction
Australia’s leading fresh food supplier has collaborated with IBM Business Consulting Services to design and implement wireless tracking solutions for new hydroponics production facilities, increasing productivity and achieving better communication with retailers.
Business needs
The fresh food market in Australia is constantly booming. Retailers hope to purchase fresher products, get lower prices, and achieve manufacturer-to-manufacturer information exchange. In order to maintain a leading position in the competition, Moraitis needs to improve operating efficiency, reduce operating and management costs, and adopt a sustainable development method to coordinate and develop its business proportionally.
Key challenge
By investing in new technologies, Moraitis strives to maintain a competitive advantage in the fresh food market. Moraitis has opened a new hydroponic greenhouse covering an area of 2.4 hectares (5.9 acres) in Tatura, Victoria. The production of the greenhouse will increase the company’s annual tomato production to 1.5 million kilograms (3.3 million pounds) and cultivate high-quality, disease-proof and affordable tomatoes to meet the needs of consumers and retailers. This expansion allows Moraitis to establish a stronger and potentially proprietary quantitative sourcing relationship with retailers.
Moraitis decided to tighten the supply chain by investing in technological solutions, enabling end-to-end visualization and product tracking, optimizing communication with consumers, and improving production and packaging processes. Moraitis hopes to use this measure to better meet consumers’ demand for fresh and natural food, establish a stronger relationship with retailers, reduce the operation and management costs of tomato classification and packaging, and realize the visualization of products throughout the supply chain. The grower obtains more precise data on the quality of the product.
Solution: IBM Business Consulting Services
Moraitis turned to IBM Business Consulting Services to develop an end-to-end solution for the new tomato production facility. The IBM team designed an application that uses wireless technology to track products in the overall production process, and manages the various procedures from the collection of requirements to the execution. Based on IBM’s evaluation of Moraitis environment and processes, the team used Java technology to develop an application on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server, and cooperated with a third-party vendor Magellan to manufacture RFID tags and RFID channels for Moraitis Reader.
This solution allows Moraitis to control the entire process of grading, packaging and shipping tomatoes. The growers transport the tomatoes in bulk in large containers, which are then graded according to size and quality and packed into tomato pallets. An RFID tag is attached to each pallet, which contains information on the size and quality of the tomatoes. In this process, it is very important for Moraitis to understand the number and variety of tomatoes that are in the packaging process, because they can know how much they can supply to retailers and obtain accurate performance information from growers in order to reasonably pay . The solution uses a local database instance to store all the information on the processed tomato pallets. The application runs on a J2EE application server and is fully supported and maintained by Moraitis. This is an important consideration to provide lower operating costs.
Results
After adopting the IBM solution, the grading machine and integrated RFID components enable up to 9 packaging teams to perform packaging at the same time. RFID solutions can increase production or reduce the time required for packaging in accordance with Moraitis’s requirements, enabling products to be shipped earlier and staff assigned to other tasks. The solution can clearly show what product is being processed and the precise account of the output, enabling Moraitis to make informed decisions for the supply chain based on the total supply, based on the precise output of the grower rather than ungraded bulk Payment for goods. Moreover, Moraitis can now provide retailers with information about incoming goods. The label on each pallet contains detailed information about the grower, which can be traced from the grower to the retailer.
client status
As Australia’s leading fresh food production company, Moraitis Fresh grows, packs and processes fresh food in Australia’s main production areas and retail markets.
[ad_2]
