Title: The minimisation of giveaway and underweight in poultry proportioning process

Authors: Mahmoud Awad; Ahmed Ababneh; Mohamed Elaradi

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE ' Industrial Engineering Department, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE ' Industrial Engineering Department, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Abstract: Food processing organisations are always looking for ways to reduce their operational cost without sacrificing their product safety or quality. One of the critical processes in food industry is the final portion cutting and packaging. If not optimised properly, the portion cutting and packaging process of poultry results in large quantities of unaccounted giveaways or underweight packages leading into profit loss. This paper utilises the DMAIC Six Sigma approach to minimise giveaway and underweight simultaneously for one of the large-scale poultry organisations in UAE. A manual sorting process is implemented and resulted in a giveaway reduction from 9.7% to 4.81% while an automated sorting machine is expected to decrease it further to 0.80%. The results can be scaled to other food organisations regardless of the company size and demonstrates the effectiveness of Six Sigma approach to reduce waste while complying with quality and governmental standards.

Keywords: Six Sigma; proportions giveaway; poultry industry; packaging; process improvement; weight variations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSCA.2023.130347

International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage, 2023 Vol.14 No.3, pp.351 - 370

Received: 01 Aug 2021
Accepted: 22 Jul 2022
Published online: 17 Apr 2023 *