| 45 Flagship products at cutting edge Karen Phelps TOMRA Fresh Food’s New Zealand operation is evolving innovative technologies that are being exported globally. TOMRA: 50th anniversary HORTICULTURE With around 80 staff working in its research and development department, TOMRA Fresh Food’s New Zealand operation is evolving innovative technologies that are being exported globally. It’s flagship products are the TOMRA 5S Advanced, a large fruit grading platform; KATO 260, a small fruit grading platform; Spectrim, a large fruit inspection product and the CURO16, a high speed filling and weighing machine. Vice president head of innovation for TOMRA Fresh Food James French says the latest evolution of the TOMRA 5S Advanced represent significant advances in the areas of hygienic operation and food safety. Traditional padded surfaces have been replaced with sculpted stainless steel and moulded polymer surfaces delivering an improvement in IRD (impact recording device) results and fruit flow. It can be cleaned thoroughly without specialist mechanical skills to dismantle parts of the machine. Regular tasks such as removing and cleaning cross belts, which would have previously been measured in hours, now take just 5 to 10 minutes, and no longer require specialized staff and tools. KATO 260 is TOMRA’s small fruit grading platform. It represents a big change for the industry as it moved from negative selection sorting (trying to identify and remove bad fruit from the line) to positive selection (identifying the fruit with the attributes clients want to keep). to page 46 Technology – the bridge between the present and your future When your in-house IT team is at capacity, innovation can be challenging, and the focus is often to just keep systems running smoothly. Many organisations in New Zealand are wrestling with a huge backlog of IT projects that were sidelined during the pandemic, and are now also facing challenges around remote working, modernising and migrating various systems and of course monitoring and reporting on key business metrics for your key stakeholders. One client expressed his situation just this week, saying, “There is just too much happening – we can’t cope. And it’s not just IT, it is organisational change management we need to solve at the same time.” Whilst there is no silver bullet solution, outsourcing of IT resource can be part of the answer for SMB and commercial scale businesses. Partnering with an organisation like Enlighten Designs means you can get expert help where its required, so you can speed up those important projects that make a tangible di erence in your business. The challenge of attracting and maintaining talented workers, and managing the project is transferred to the partner, so you can be free to focus on the change management part of the equation. Tomra Foods approached Enlighten Designs for support on two of their business-critical applications. Along with providing technical support for legacy applications, the Enlighten team – with creativity in their DNA – has now sought out other ways to make a di erence in their business. Enlighten looks forward to growing our relationship with Tomra Foods as they continue to lead the way in digital agriculture. Enlighten Designs is set up for true partnership and o ers a range of interrelated services to guide clients along the journey towards their optimal technology solution. Many clients start with an Illuminate workshop to gain clarity across their own team, from which we can start designing a project roadmap that considers ALL the needs of your business. From there, our distinct Practices become involved with design, development, user testing of the chosen solution, and of course post-implementation support to ensure that those little enhancements and fixes are addressed promptly. With clients across several countries, industries and types, the learnings gathered from such diverse work can be applied to all our clients’ projects – that’s the magic of being local and global.
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