The key to the return on investment

The key to the return on investment includes productivity improvement and labor cost reduction. The productivity improvement is the volume of oysters to be inspected in a given time frame using the vision system equipment with some hand labor vs. using all hand labor to evaluate and separate the grade of oyster. The labor cost reduction is the number of workers can be saved using the vision system. For productivity improvement, the vision system is capable of grading six pieces of oyster per second, which is much faster than the manual process. For labor cost reduction, labor for locations 4 (grading) and 7 and 8 (counting) shown in Fig. 1 can be saved. For a medium size operation, this means labor costs of
at least four workers can be saved. In average, the cost of the machine can be paid off in 1 year of operation.. 1.