Automatic weighing machine for improving competitiveness of Thai SMEs in seafood cold storage business

Due to sharply rising labor costs in Thailand, many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in various industrial sectors including seafood industry need to improve their competitive capability. The aim of proposed system is to replace workers with automatic machine for upgrading Thai SMEs in seafood cold storage business to survive and maintain their independence. A technique to design and implement an automatic weighing machine for packaging process of fresh whole fish products is presented. The proposed machine is not only specially developed for use in wet environments but also simple to operate and easy to maintain. Its total cost is about one-fifth cheaper than imported machines. Performances of the implemented machine have been observed at a seafood cold storage in Mahachai, Samut Sakhon, Thailand. With automatically weighting operations, the productivity can be increased by more than 1.6 times, while the labor cost can be reduced to 0.625 times, compared to manual operations. In addition, a payback period is approximately equal to 1.14 years.