Effective use of product quality information in meat processing

Abstract

This paper presents a case study on use of advanced product quality information in meat processing. To serve segmented customer demand meat processors consider use of innovative sensor technology to sort meat products to customer orders. To assess the use of this sensor technology a discrete-event simulation model is built. Various scenarios were defined for processing strategy (buffered or non-buffered), the number of end product groups to sort to and the availability of product quality information. The performance of these scenarios is measured w.r.t. order compliance, labor consumption and throughput-time. Our results reveal that the current processing and product sorting strategy is in-effective for sorting to a large number of end product groups. Furthermore, the current availability of product quality information is insufficient to ensure high levels of order compliance for advanced product quality products