The vocabulary changes from a cashew line to a palm oil mill to an intake centre. The method does not: capture the work where it happens, show it live, flag what leaves its approved range, and put the decision in front of the right person with the reasoning attached. Every system also answers questions in plain language, so a manager can ask the plant what happened instead of asking for a report.
Plants and mills record everything and see little of it in time. Station sheets, shift logs and spreadsheets carry the most important figures, and management receives them days or weeks later. The machines are not connected to anything, and they do not need to be: we capture at the station, from the scale, the sheet, the counter or the camera.
Côte d'Ivoire grows more cashew than any other country and exports most of it raw. Processors who add value locally compete with Vietnam and India on conversion cost and consistency. Even a modern automated line sends twenty to thirty per cent of its kernels to manual finishing, and the whole line still runs on paper.
Which lots have been at peeling longer than target?
Two. CS26-084 at machine peeling for 11.6 days against a target of 9, and CS26-089 at manual peeling for 8.0 days against 7. Both arrived in week 42. The first is waiting on a sorter changeover logged at 06:40. Lot timelines attached.
A mill is a chain of stations that each lose a little oil: the sterilisers, the thresher, the presses, the clarifiers. The fruit arrives by the truckload from plantations and smallholders, the oil leaves by the tanker, and the number everyone watches, the extraction rate, is usually computed once a month from the tank dips. By then nobody can say which shift, which press or which supplier moved it.
Why was extraction low on Tuesday?
Tuesday closed at 20.2% against a band of 21 to 23. Press 2 ran below pressure for 3.5 hours after the 09:40 stop, and fibre loss on that line was 7.9% against a 6.5% average. Fruit quality by supplier was unchanged from Monday. Maintenance log and station readings attached.
Before the factory there are the trucks: raw material bought at collection centres, weighed, paid for, moved to the mill and weighed again. The gaps between those weights are where a plant loses margin without seeing it.
A processor buying from thousands of farmers runs a network of collection centres. Each receives raw material by truck, tricycle and cart, weighs it full and empty, pays the farmer on the difference, stores it, and sends it on to the factory by the lorry-load. Management set a target for the season. The question every week is whether each centre is on the path to it, and whether what was paid for is what arrived.
Which centres are behind the season target, and is it volume or price?
Two of eight. Centre D is 14% behind on volume with price on budget: deliveries dropped after week 41, when a competing buyer opened nearby. Centre F is on volume but paying 6% above budget per tonne since week 43. The other six are on or ahead of the path. Weekly detail attached.
Above the floor sits the management view: the questions the board asks, the reports that take a week to prepare, the figures nobody fully trusts. The same records that run the floor and the accounts can answer them live.
For a group with several sites, the purchases, expenses, payroll, stock and sales live in the ERP and the accounting system. Getting an answer means asking finance, waiting for an extract and reconciling it by hand. The board sees the figures at the monthly meeting, by which time the month is gone.
| Supplier | This season | Last season | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supplier A | 412 / t | 405 / t | +1.7% |
| Supplier B | 448 / t | 411 / t | +9.0% |
| Supplier C | 398 / t | 402 / t | −1.0% |
Tell us which part of the operation you cannot see clearly, or which decision you want better inputs for. We map the process, design the system around it, and put it to work in weeks.
Lisbon · Abidjan