Design and implementation of automation for plant nursery process time reduction

Abstract

This research aims to implement appropriate automation for improving the plant nursery production process. Automation implementation is done in several steps, beginning from waste elimination, design and development of an automated system, and automation implementation. Irrigation and re-planting processes were selected to be automated, however only the re-planting process was selected to be used as a case study for this research. An automated re-planting process was, therefore, next designed and developed. Thereafter, the automated re-planting system was implemented in the nursery for evaluation. The automation implementation results, show that the system is able to double the nursery production capacity and reduce 8.4% of production cost per-unit. Furthermore, the case study also reveals three main principles for successfully implementing automation in small and medium businesses (1) focusing on physical and repetitive work (2) utilizing the least complex automation available, and (3) considering additional opportunities after automation implementation