Findus Sverige AB, referred to as Findus from now on, harvests peas during a period of
around 50 days during the summer. The harvest generates about 30 000 tonnes of peas
which gives around 40 000 pallets to distribute to the warehouses which Findus uses for
final storage. Three hours after the peas are picked in the fields, they have to be frozen
to keep their good taste and quality. Because of this the pallets are marked with a
preliminary label with quality classification of the content. The Findus quality department
then has one day to determine the correct quality of each pallet.
In previous seasons distribution has been completely unco-ordinated. Transports have
been sent randomly to the warehouses with unsorted pallets and mixed transport
packaging types, e.g. bags and containers. The mix has reduced the fill rate of the
transports because of poor stacking possibilities. At the different warehouses there was
no opportunity to affix new labels after quality inspections. This means that there was no
guarantee that the information on the label matches what was inside the packaging.
For the harvest season of 2008, a new flow for the logistics was tested for the two kinds
of transport packaging units; bags and internal container. Those two packaging types had
one day of quarantine, caused by quality inspections, in a crossdock centre. Pallets were
sorted in the centre according to article number, and temporarily stored in mobile racks.
When the Findus quality department had checked the quality of the pallets, they sent out
a list of pallets that should be given new labels with correct content information. After
relabelling, the pallets were ready to be distributed to one of final warehouses. The
purpose of the crossdock centre was to ensure a sorted co-ordinated flow, guaranteed
correct labeling and increased fill rate in the lorries by using the crossdock centre as a
buffer. The result from 2008 became a new Findus record of pea production with a total
of 31 100 tonnes. The previous record was 29 262 tonnes from 2003.
The purpose of this mater thesis is to map the information and material flow with their
important processes, with a focus on the crossdock centre. The thesis should become an
instruction manual for future pea co-ordinators and also include an evaluation of the
crossdock centre capacity. The material flow study is focused on the crossdock centre
and ingoing and outgoing transports. Harvesting and production flow are delimited a...
