This paper studies manufacturing processes in a wooden furniture manufacturing company. The company suffers from long manufacturing lead times and an unbalanced production line. To identify sources of waste and delay value stream mapping (VSM) and a discrete event simulation model is implemented. VSM is used to visualize and analyze the major processes of the company and provide quantifiable KPIs; the manufacturing lead-time and then Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) settings. A discrete event simulation model is then built to analyze the company on a wider scale and provide the data required to identify bottlenecks. Building on the data gathered from the production lines and the simulation model, two-bottleneck detection methods are used, the utilization method, and the waiting time method. Then based on the comparison of the two methods a third bottleneck detection is utilized; the scenario-based method, to identify the primary and secondary bottlenecks. After the bottlenecks are identified, changes are then evaluated using the simulation model and radar charts were built based on the improved simulation model, which evaluates the effect of changes in the utilization and OEE results. This work managed to neutralize the effect of one of the main bottlenecks and minimize the effect of the other. The manufacturing utilization was increased by 15.8% for the main bottleneck resources followed by 2.4% for the second one. However, it is hard to convince the traditional administration of this small size manufacturing plant to adopt a completely revolutionizing, costly, and risky (at such level) lean manufacturing approach. This paper studies and provides a much lower in cost and verified scheme of enhancement.

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Citrus supply chains (CSC) are increasingly important in research due to high loss and waste, increasing demand, wide application for other industries, and differences in CSCs from country to country. This study proposes a new structure for CSC by introducing collection points to collect citrus from the farms in Jordan Valley and transport it to a citrus hub responsible for receiving, packaging, and transporting the citrus to distribution centers. The objective of this structure is to minimize the loss and waste and provide a new supply chain (SC) with stable infrastructure to track citrus from the initial stages and implement technologies such as the Cold SC. Therefore, it is crucial to find the optimum number of collection points, citrus hubs, and locations based on carbon footprint and transportation costs. The model introduced was solved using Open Solver Adds-ins after collecting data such as distances and coordinates using Google Maps and the altitude of those coordinates from SolarGIS. After running the model, it was found that the optimum number of collection points is 52 and the optimum number of citrus hubs is two. The results showed that the transportation costs of one hub are lower by 30%, whereas for two hubs are lower by 60% compared to the current location of the central market of fruits and vegetables (CM). The “kg CO2 e/kg citrus” values are 0.48 and 0.24 for one hub and two hubs, respectively, which showed a significant reduction compared to CM, which was 0.69 kg CO2 e/kg citrus. Therefore, installing two citrus hubs will improve the overall sustainable performance of CSC. Future research might be directed to integrate the circular economy into CSC and find possible applications for citrus loss and waste.

Packaging plays a key role in preserving food products during transportation. Therefore, selecting proper packaging crates to transport fruits from farms to the market can dramatically reduce loss and waste. This study aims to evaluate the environmental impact of two packaging alternatives when transporting citrus products in Jordan using the loss ratio, as an indicator to select the best packaging, based on the traveled distances. The research team tracked transportation trucks from several farms to the market. In addition, data were collected from the department of statistics in Jordan to build the model using OpenLCA Software with defined system boundaries. However, the results revealed that polypropylene crates performed better than polystyrene crates. Citrus loss during transportation was cut by at least 60% when using polypropylene crates. The use of polypropylene crates reduced product damages by handling better the vibration and load stress, especially with increased transport distances to the “Central Market of fruits and vegetables”. Different impact categories were evaluated. We selected 3 categories based on the hotspot analysis performed: climate change, resource depletion, and water resource depletion. Farm waste has the highest impact with ranges of 58–69%, 77–85%, and 77–81%, respectively. Other impactful waste is waste from packaging and inedible parts; they influence the impact categories up to 23%, 11%, and 17%, in the same order. In terms of environmental impact, the polypropylene crates have fewer impacts since they are reusable and recyclable at the end of the product life cycle. Therefore, we recommend adopting polypropylene crates when transporting citrus products to the market. As a future research direction, the study suggests performing a similar analysis to evaluate the effect of packaging crates on other agricultural products in Jordan.