Reducing giveaway in egg cartons using process mining

Kinross Farms is a Victorian egg production, processing and packaging company that handles more than 100 million eggs annually. Kinross Farms use advanced electronic processing and grading equipment, which automates the egg processing and packing, and collects a wide range of data during operations. Eggs are graded and packed into specific nominal weight cartons (from 300g to 900g). Due to the inherent variability in egg sizes, egg cartons often contain more weight than expected (giveaway). The giveaway has led to more than $200,000 AUD lost profit in a single year. This project aims to investigate the giveaway problem, analyses possible causes using the data collected by the equipment and identify possible improvements to reduce the giveaway and increase the company’s profit. This project has been divided into 5 stages:

1. Familiarisation with Kinross Farms' packaging processes
2. Identification of the components of the giveaway problem (downgrade and in-grade variation)
3. Data consolidation and analysis of downgrade, with proposed solution
4. Test the proposed recommendations at Kinross’ Euroa grading floor
5. Presentation of the results

The project devised possible strategies to minimize the giveaway problem in the Kinross packaging process.