Phil Coles on Redesigning Harvesting Processes

Image by iStock/SlavkoSereda

In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, host Stephanie Veto talks with Phil Coles ’11G about his versatile career in agribusiness, and his recently published studies on redesigned the harvesting process and growing demands for locally grown produce. 

Coles is a teaching associate professor in the DATA Department. He also holds an MBA in supply chain management from Lehigh. 

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Below is an edited excerpt from the conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF].

Veto: Describe what a Kaizen facilitator is. 

Coles: The idea behind Kaizen is exactly what it stands for. Kai means change. Zen means good. It's the literal translation, but you interpret that as continuous improvement. And one of the things that's important is to get the people involved. So traditionally, you have the boss. The boss knows everything. And the people on the front lines, they're treated like the proletariat, right? Everybody's heard of that. I don't pay you to think, I pay you to do what you're told. That's really a bad way to manage people. Everybody has ideas. Those are the people that are on the front lines. They see what's happening. They know what's going on. They might not be an engineer or an accountant or a biologist, but they see what's going on. They have great experience. So you pull them in. 

For example, the harvesters were redesigning this piece of equipment we call a hook. And we call it a hook because it hooks on the side of the bed. And that's what holds the baskets that the mushrooms go into. It's very important to have a good design on this so we could do quick changeovers, right? They weren't welders, but they had ideas how they wanted to be designed. So, they needed a welder. 

They had a fabricator that would cut it and a welder that would weld the pieces together. We even brought in an agricultural engineering professor from the University of Delaware. Whatever it is that they needed, I would make sure they had it. 

Veto: Do you have an example of the biggest inefficiency or biggest waste that you saw when you went into manufacturing companies? 

Coles: The biggest thing, and almost nobody appreciates it, is inventory. When I say inventory, it's not so much the finished product. It's the work-in-process inventory. That causes so many problems that people don't realize. 

The quality is really hurt by all this in-process inventory. Because what happens is you're producing stuff in very large lot sizes. 

Say I'm making a brake component, and your job is to then put the brake component onto the car. If I make one and I drilled the holes in the wrong place, you can say to me, "I can't put the bolts in to attach it to the car because you drilled the holes in the wrong place." So, we immediately know that, and we immediately correct it. 

But now if I made 100,000, and maybe they're $10 a piece, that's a million dollars, right? Now I just gave you a million dollars’ worth of stuff and you go to put it on and it's no good. What do we do? Are you going to tell the boss? I'm not telling the boss. Maybe just stick them on the car with a little bit of duct tape and let it go down the line. Let somebody else find it, right? So, they get in trouble instead of you. 

Veto: Can you talk about a recent study Redesigning Harvesting Processes and Improving Working Conditions in Agribusiness? 

Coles: In growing, harvesting is by far, not even close, absolute highest cost. So, when you look at the costs that are involved in composting, there's a lot of innovations that have happened over the years to make it more efficient. If you look at planting the seeds, there are all kinds of innovations. But harvesting, it's still people that are picking mushrooms. 

We're always looking at that process, trying to make it better all the time to improve that efficiency. It's something that hasn't been able to be effectively mechanized. So, it's very, very expensive. How do we make people more efficient? That's what we wanted to focus on. 

Veto: Do you have one big takeaway or surprise? 

Coles: I don't know that I have a surprise other than the complexity of it. This was a really complicated paper. It had so many different things in it. And there's still a whole bunch more because the growers were actually interested in grazing not from an ergonomic standpoint. 

It increases the yield. And whenever you're in any kind of a yield business, it's kind of weird. So, when you build cars or build televisions or whatever, you take these components and you put them together. In a yield business, you kind of make an environment that's really good or not so good. If you do a good job, you get a lot. If you don’t do a good job, you don't get a whole lot. 

The harvesting is a variable cost. Most things are fixed, all the other inputs. Yield is so, so important. And that's where it originally came from. We haven't even looked at that yet. We're looking at these two different types of harvesting systems, but it's all the different ways that you can pay them. 

To be cliché, we find more questions than we find answers because we find things that we didn't even think about before. It's like, "Holy smoke, we're going to tie all these things together."