Track: Masters Thesis Competition

Abstract

This research aims to implement appropriate automation for improving the
plant nursery production process. Automation implementation is done in several steps,
beginning from waste elimination, design and development of an automated system,
and automation implementation. Irrigation and re-planting processes were selected to
be automated, however only the re-planting process was selected to be used as a case
study for this research. An automated re-planting process was, therefore, next designed
and developed. Thereafter, the automated re-planting system was implemented in the
nursery for evaluation. The automation implementation results, show that the system is
able to double the nursery production capacity and reduce 8.4% of production cost
per-unit. Furthermore, the case study also reveals three main principles for
successfully implementing automation in small and medium businesses; (1) focusing
on physical and repetitive work; (2) utilising the least complex automation available,
and; (3) considering additional opportunities after automation implementation