National Fruit Products Company

Case Studies - National Fruit Products Company

Location: Winchester, Virginia
Facility Size: 945,000 Square Feet

Challenge:

National Fruit was growing in both sales and new product lines. Production lines had been added over the years as space allowed. Distribution to institiutional customers and wholesale customers was done out of separate warehouses. The campus consists of 4 main buildings and a number of smaller storage and production buildings. Because of the way that production lines were added, there was no defined process flow. The product flow between buildings and warehouses involved a fleet of 5 tractor trailers to move product around the site.

Solution:

Trommer & Associates, Inc. worked extensively with National Fruit to understand the seasonality of their product and the process flow of the product through the production process. Reorganizing and placing similar functions together and aligning the processes created a linear production path that eliminated unnecessary handling and almost all of the on-site truck moves.

Benefits:

Based upon the layout and recommendations provided by our project team, the revised layout stream-lined production and eliminated duplicate equipment. A single distribution point eliminated on-site truck movement, reduced damage, and lost or unidentified inventory. Unlabeled product or bright stock was centrally located in the new distribution warehouse so that it could be quickly labeled to meet customer demand.

The single distribution point also reduced commercial truck loading time.

Re-use of out-buildings for supplies and ingredient storage eliminated off-site storage of finished goods.

Additional benefits include:

Eliminated Homeland Security issues through better site utilization.
Flexible production planning due to regrouping of like equipment.
Easy line change over due to single depalletizing area.
Additional operating space in the existing facility.