You are the owner of an apple pack house operation in New Zealand. Each harvest season needs to engage the “right people, doing the right things at the right time” in order to meet export shipment deadlines.
1. What is the range of essential functions that you need to fulfill with the right people (i.e., people who possess the right skills/ experience)? Need to find six functions.
2. Because your employees have originated from a range of different countries, describe how you will purposely go about creating and nurturing a constructive/position workplace culture.
3. For whatever reason, suddenly you observe a reduction in the quality of fruit that is being processed through the pack house. Defective fruit is making it through both the Grading workstation and the Packing workstation, and when cartons of finished fruit are being stacked on pallets, the stackers observe defective (e.g., rotten) fruit inside certain cartons.
Decribe what courses of action you deem are sensible to take to bring the incidence rate of defective fruit back to be within an acceptable tolerance range.
4. Phytosanitary inspection of randomly selected cartons of packed fruit is performed periodically. Why are such inspections performed, how are the results from checks captured/ recorded (and why), and how could the data from these checks be used to improve aspects of the orchard operation that was responsible for producing/growing the fruit?
5. The owner wants to respond to advice from the owner of the orchard who supplies the pack house with harvested apples each season, that recently planted new apple trees will be bearing fruit that will be harvested this coming season. It is expected that this extra volume of fruit will necessitate significant changes being made to the apple pack house production process.
Describe the types of changes that you consider may be necessary in the pack house operation to accommodate the anticipated increase in fruit volume. In particular, what resources do you think would need to be replaced/ upgraded/ added.