Christmas Wreaths Count Challenges

♦ A premium floral farm-to-market company producing superior quality niche products, with expertise in a diverse selection of specialty greenery catering specifically to wholesalers and mass-market retailers.

♦ Every year, between the months of Sep – Nov, CFG manufactures over 400,000 wreaths by operating 24 hours a day, 5 days a week working with local hired hands.

♦ The wreath manufacturing line with 15 assembly stations, roughly 6 feet apart from each other produces a wreath every 3 minutes.

♦ Each worker is paid based on the number of wreaths they have produced in their 8-hour work-shift, with an estimated throughput of 2,400 wreaths per shift, or 7,200 wreaths per day.

♦ Another team of workers are constantly reconciling the number of wreaths produced by each worker and delivering them to a QC station.

♦ The challenge lay in speed and accuracy of wreath counting and reconciliation for every worker, inability to identify the worker station for rejected wreaths and the exact time they were produced, and compensation issues.

Intervention of Work In progress (WIP) Visibility Solution

♦ InThing's Work In Progress Visibility solution' was implemented to automate the count of wreaths produced at each station by each worker. 

♦ Display the count of wreaths on a monitor at each station, so that the worker and CFG are aligned on the number of wreaths produced by each worker, which would resolve compensation challenges.

♦ For rejected wreaths, identify the worker station and the exact time of production.

♦ Reduce the labor-intensive workflows in counting and reconciling the wreaths.

♦ Achieve a 100% accuracy of wreaths assembled by every worker, in real-time.

100% visibility and accuracy of wreaths production

♦ Continental Floral Greens used the Zebra-InThing solution to track and trace the production of their floral wreaths by seasonal workers at their work stations. Using RFID tags, handheld RFID readers & Visium on the handheld, movement of finished wreaths, 'Accepts' and 'Rejects' were monitored with worker traceability, and updates and insights delivered realtime.

♦ The current labor-intensive manual processes was automated to deliver greater accuracy and transparency with a scalable solution to transform workflows and build unprecedented worker trust.

♦ InThing’s WIP Visibility Solution provided 100% accuracy in total wreath count of every worker in realtime, with end-to-end traceability of wreath production from assembling station to finished product. There was reduction in the number of rejected wreath counts and minimized labor during reconciliation.