CompuWeigh Corporation • 203-262-9400 • http://www.compuweigh.com
When Lincoln Premium Poultry was designing its new 12,500-tpw feed mill in Fremont, NE (402-704-2200), the original idea was to handle weighing, grading, truck routing, and scale tickets manually. But the company soon thought better and installed a SmartTruck truck receiving system from CompuWeigh Corp., Woodbury, CT (203-262-9400).
“The biggest reason for me was the background knowledge I brought here from Cargill AgHorizons (Council Bluffs, IA),” says Plant Manager Brent Brinegar.
Brinegar notes that the plant has been handling up to 105 trucks, bringing corn and feed ingredients to the plant, which began production in the summer of 2019. The feed that the plant produces goes to feed birds that become rotisserie chickens sold nationwide at Costco.
“We really liked their (CompuWeigh’s) RFID system,” he says. “And considering the number of trucks we process, we wanted to eliminate the mistakes you can get with a manual system.”
Finally, to comply with provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the system allows the driver to answer prior load declaration questions.
So Lincoln Premium Poultry sat down with its construction contractor, Younglove Construction LLC, Sioux City, IA (712-277-3906), to revamp the facility’s layout. The scalehouse was moved away from the mill building, and what was to be a single truck lane went to two lanes. Traffic flow was designed to move from east to west with no backtracking.
Driver takes his scale ticket from a CompuWeigh OTP-4800 ticket printer alongside the outbound scale.
Truck Receiving
Drivers servicing the Fremont mill are issued an RFID tag to be hung from the sun visor. As the driver pulls up onto the inbound scale after the load is sampled, the SmartTruck system reads the tag to determine the identity of the truck and the commodity it is carrying.
Meanwhile, the sample is graded, and the driver is instructed by a SmartView digital display to continue to one of two enclosed receiving pits.
“The SmartTruck system interfaces with our Beta Raven plant automation system,” Brinegar says. “In turn, the automation system finds the appropriate home for the load, so that it is never sent to the wrong bin.”
After the driver deposits the load into the appropriate receiving pit, the truck continues onto an outbound scale. The driver receives a scale ticket via a CompuWeigh OTP-4800 outdoor ticket printer mounted alongside the scale.
Brinegar notes that a manual truck processing system remains in place as a backup to SmartTruck. “But so far,” he said during an interview in February 2020, “we haven’t had to issue a single manual scale ticket.”
Reprinted from GRAIN JOURNAL March/April 2020 Issue
