Continental Floral Greens: real-time wreath counts that workers trust

Customer

Continental Floral Greens (CFG)

Partners

Zebra Technologies and Redline Solutions

Use cases

Jobs & travelers · Temp workers

Solution

InThing WIP visibility with Visium and Trapeze in the cloud; RFID readers with field antennas; a display at each workstation

The challenge

Founded in 2008, Continental Floral Greens is a farm-to-market company delivering premium floral products to wholesalers and mass-market retailers. Its Christmas assortment — wreaths, garlands and centerpieces — is high-volume, seasonal and perishable.

Every Christmas season, from September to November, CFG produces more than 1 million wreaths on a line of 15 assembly stations, running 24 hours a day, five days a week with seasonal workers. Workers are paid per wreath, and another team reconciled counts by hand before wreaths went to quality control. Nobody could reliably tell which station a rejected wreath came from, or when it was made — so counting was slow, disputes were common and labor costs kept rising.

The solution

• Every worker’s badge carries an RFID tag associated with them in Visium; scanning the badge at a workbench links the worker to that station.
• Workers attach a pre-printed RFID label to each wreath. The first time the tag is seen, it is linked to that workbench and worker; later reads elsewhere are ignored, so counts can’t be inflated.
• A display at each station shows the worker’s produced count in real time.
• At the QA station the wreath goes down an accept or reject path; the system looks up its workbench and updates accepted and rejected counts on the display immediately.
• Multi-tag anomalies are flagged automatically, and preconfigured reports give per-worker counts with full history.

The results

CFG now tracks more than 1 million wreaths each Christmas season with 100% accuracy in total wreath counts for every worker, a 99.7% production approval rate and 6,000–7,000 wreaths tracked each day — with end-to-end traceability from assembly station to finished product, fewer rejected wreaths and far less labor spent on reconciliation.

Because workers and managers see the same live numbers, pay is based on counts both sides can verify. Pay reconciliation changed with it: 72 hours of manual reconciliation labor eliminated daily, the shift headcount dedicated to pay-tracking audits cut from three to zero, and zero pay-reconciliation disputes after rollout.

Watch the CFG project video on YouTube.

As a farm-to-market agricultural company, we bring in several workers during the Christmas season to make wreaths which is our highest selling product. While our process has been manual all this while, many additions to the warehouse have mandated the introduction of technology, mainly RFID solutions for tracking and traceability of our final products. By implementing the solution, we have seen the work better streamlined, freeing up our supervisors from constant monitoring so they focus more on quality control. Our processes have become smoother and there’s peace of mind that data received is correct.

Continental Floral Greens