Egg producer Deans Foods says it has achieved significant productivity gains by introducing a mobile solution to manage its egg collection business. The system was developed and implemented by Mnetics Europe.

It is a large-scale operation. The company uses 60 drivers to collect eggs from hundreds of producers throughout the UK, and then processes them at ten packing centres.

Previously eggs were logged and tracked with a manual paper-based system, using three-part "tickets". Drivers were responsible for entering all the source data - an arrangement that was both time-consuming and prone to human error.

Project manager Bob Firth says the Mnetics solution has substantially reduced the paperwork and largely eliminated keying of data at the grading machines. "Transcription into our main computer system has also been greatly facilitated."

 

The system is built round a driver-oriented application program running on rugged Symbol PDT2800 handheld terminals. With these, drivers scan barcodes containing location information on each of the production units, then record the quantity of eggs collected for each "lay date" at the production unit. Finally they print a label out on the spot, using a Zebra QL420 rugged mobile printer.

The label is then kept with the eggs and used to identify and track them as they move through production and packaging. The driver also prints out a single summary receipt to give to the producer, confirming the total eggs collected and detailing the quantities from each unit.

Data is transferred from the handheld terminals when drivers return to the packing centre, and final labels are produced for manual records. The data is also accumulated and processed centrally, providing a full audit trail for every egg.