Design, Testing, and Implementation of a Data Automation System for the Peanut Quality Inspection Process

摘要

The current manual peanut inspection system requires inspectors to hand record about 14 million pieces of grade information and hand calculate about 8 million percentages on the 600,000 lots marketed annually. This results in up to 26% of these manually recorded grade certificates having errors. An automated data collection system was developed that reduces errors in recording and calculating grade factors. In addition, labor is reduced since recording data electronically eliminates manual recording,calculating, and checking of grade data. Variability in calculating dollar value was reduced up to 11%. Depending on the type of error occurring at specific buying points, implementing the system could save the peanut industry up to 6 dollar million annually. A commercial computer company is marketing a version of the automated data collection system for use with current grading equipment.