About
Starting Semester: Spring 2027Assigned: No
Location: Hapeville
Royal Fresh Cuts
Client Profile
Royal Fresh Cuts is a rapidly growing, family-owned company located in Hapeville, Georgia. The company specializes in fresh-cut fruit and vegetable products for foodservice, retail, and school-system customers. It operates two nearby facilities at 3600 and 3675 Zip Industrial Boulevard. Products are distributed directly from both facilities and to Royal Food Service, a sister company located on the same street.Royal Food Service is operationally treated as Royal Fresh Cuts’ largest customer. Royal Fresh Cuts also purchases raw materials from Royal Food Service daily. Delays in these deliveries can create shortages and bottlenecks because many of the materials are needed immediately to support production.
Warehouse operations support all receiving, put away, production material issuance, consumption, finished-product output, inventory, picking, staging, loading, shipping, and building-to-building transfer activities. Because these functions occur before, during, and after production, warehouse coverage is required across nearly continuous 24-hour operating cycles.
Project Description
Royal Fresh Cuts would like to optimize its warehouse operating model, with a focus on personnel allocation, scheduled labor hours, material storage, and movement between locations. The primary objective is to reduce warehouse-related operating cost per pound while maintaining the coverage required to support production, food safety, inventory accuracy, and customer service while maintaining flexibility due to seasonal or volume fluctuations.As a secondary objective, the project should also evaluate and optimize the “home slots” assigned to raw and packaging materials. Current storage locations and movement routes should be reviewed based on material usage, receiving source, destination production line, velocity, transfer requirements, and handling frequency.
Royal Fresh Cuts can provide at least two years of labor and cost data through ADP Analytics, including worked hours, scheduled hours, overtime, and employee-level costs. Detailed warehouse transactional data is also available through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central reports and data exports.
The student team will have full access to both facilities for observation, employee interviews, process mapping, and time studies. The warehouse workforce has relatively low turnover, with an average employee tenure of approximately three years.
Claudio Garcia, Director of Warehouse, Shipping, and Inventory, will serve as the primary day-to-day contact and project facilitator. Will Craycraft, a former Georgia Tech summer intern, now employed full-time by Royal Fresh Cuts in an Industrial Engineering and Continuous Improvement role, will also be available as an internal project resource.
Desired deliverables include:
• A recommended staffing model by facility, shift, day, and warehouse function.
• An interactive scheduling and capacity-planning model.
• The ability to adjust inputs such as receipt volume, shipping volume, production pounds, and transfer demand.
• Recommended staffing and scheduled hours based on changing workload and seasonality.
• Current-state and proposed material-flow maps.
• Recommended home-slot assignments for raw and packaging materials.
• Labor and warehouse operating cost-per-pound analysis.
• Estimated financial and operational impact.
• A prioritized implementation roadmap.