Findus Sverige AB:s distribution av frysta ärtor via cross-docking : Kartläggning och utvärdering av säsong 2008

Sammanfattning: Findus Sverige AB, referred to as Findus from now on, harvests peas during a period ofaround 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 and not studied in depth. The information flow study is a total mapping of ingoing and outgoing information from every actor in the flow. This mapping is focused on the kind of information that the different actors need to make decisions concerning their main activities.