Despite PTI requirements driving most warehouse improvements, being “able to read, decode, and track information through every step of product receipt, movement, picking, and shipping,” according to Milano, is of benefit to everyone within the fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain.
Without automation in the warehouse, many suppliers had to trade productivity for accuracy or vice versa. “You either slowed down to increase accuracy or sped up and accepted the resulting errors. Scanning and voice technologies allow a warehouse person to increase productivity and accuracy at the same time,” Milano says. It also gives management the ability to track any action in the warehouse back to the individual level, providing visibility and accountability to an area often difficult to monitor or track.
Eventually, Milano sees further integration of smartphones and tablets. “The greatly increased workload of complying with PTI will lead to greater adoption of technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), or other forms of no-touch data acquisition.”
RFID: Another Comeback?
As Milano noted, RFID is not new. The technology has been around for years and has been covered in Blueprints several times, including articles in 2005, 2009, and 2011. As the technology continues to evolve, Woods believes RFID or a similar tool will vastly improve the bar code systems currently in use within the next two or three years. “RFID could be a logical next step to making warehouses more efficient and adding another layer of depth to traceability.”
As warehouses get bigger and operations become more streamlined, firms have learned to deal with the inventory problems by tracking items as soon as they enter the warehouse, Salinas says. Newer solutions include RFID pallet tags with a layered mesh tracking system, or a voice pick system.
“Ultimately, although box level traceability is an important standard and first step in the industry, food safety and traceability will come down to individual item-level tracking,” Salinas points out.
“An RFID pallet tag allows the warehouse to ‘ping’ the location of a pallet, while a voice-pick system helps warehouse employees find, move, and track inventories by use of voice commands,” he says. “In addition to this, newer equipment, such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs), allow computers to remotely control, track, and move inventory without the assistance of human hands.”
A type of forklift vehicle, AGVs are wirelessly linked to a warehouse’s management system, notes Lew Manci, vice president of engineering for Crown Equipment Corporation in New Bremen, OH. “Crown envisions a connected warehouse in which the forklift becomes not only a roving sensor that reaches parts of the warehouse no other system is reaching, but also a hub that collects data from various other devices, acts on this data, and consolidates and analyzes it for other systems.”
Cooling, Storage & Shipping
Packing
For produce companies, packing is another activity that relates to traceability and is moving forward with new technologies. For example, there have been major advances in intelligent yield control packing systems for manual packing of soft fruit, table grapes, tomatoes, and various vegetables, according to Becky Hart, business development coordinator at United Kingdom-based Marco Ltd. in Edenbridge, Kent. “Such yield control systems are providing uplifts in productivity of 30 percent or more,” she observes, and better yet, a return on investment can be realized in as early as six months.
