The oil palm (elaeis guneensis) is a very important economic crop in West Africa where it is native. The fruit bunch contains 23 to 30% oil and is the highest yielding of all vegetable oil crops. Palm oil is the second most important vegetable oil in world consumption and the first to be commercialized internationally. Africa and indeed Nigerian was the world’s highest producer of palm oil prior to 1961. Today, Nigeria is the fourth largest producer after Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. One of the main reasons given for this fall is lack of efficient mechanized processing equipment for the small-scale producers who produce over 80% of the country’s palm oil. Their methods of production are labour intensive, batch, tedious, inefficient, and produce poor quality oil, have low throughput, unable to extract palm kernel alongside palm oil and so productivity is low and products (palm oil and palm kernel) lack competitiveness. This work has developed a mechanized oil palm fruit processing mill with six fully integrated systems for extracting good quality palm oil and palm kernel, while utilizing process wastes as the main source of heat energy. Each system/unit is expected to operate at the best quoted system efficiency. Tests are ongoing to determine and confirm these efficiencies.
It is generally assumed that the probability of the customer placing an order is always one, implying that customers will place orders regardless of producer quoted lead times and customer lead time expectations. As the job shops increasingly compete on the basis of the delivery speed and reputation, the relative performance of quoted versus actual realized lead times will have a strong effect on whether the customer will place future orders or not. A work study and manufacturing system analysis was conducted on the NIFOR digester screw press to study the techniques of job shop scheduling. Incessant delay in manufacturing process, job tardiness and unsatisfactory customers feedback had led to this research work. The work involves critical examination of all the resources and factors which affect the efficiency of the job shop. Machines set up times and run times were collected at each machine centre for all the components produced during the period of evaluation. The data collected were used as input data for the Gantt chart to evaluate the total actual times spent in performing each task. The work provides useful information for the development of an improved method of job scheduling for effective machine utilization so as to minimize the total time required for completion of all manufacturing tasks and reduce job tardiness.
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