Introduction: Picking Fruit from the Orchard
There are fruit orchards you are allowed to enter, pick the fruit with your own hands, and, after paying the grower, take home the fruit you have hand-picked yourself. As far as I have learned, these are called U-Pick orchards. A few days ago, after a long period of staying home because of COVID, I got the chance to see one of these orchards up close. For me, someone for whom trees have always been a part of life, the experience carried a nostalgic feeling and reminded me of Bibalan.
You enter the orchard from the right side of the little cabin, and after picking fruit you leave from the left side. Naturally, the scale sits on the left side of the cabin, and the cash box is placed in the middle of the cabin, closer to the scale.
On the way in, you are handed a metal bucket—like the old water pails—to put your picked fruit in. Besides a metal handle, these buckets also have a metal hook designed for hanging them from a branch. When you enter, one of the orchard staff shows you how to detach the fruit from the tree in a way that causes the least harm to the tree. When we wanted to use a stepladder, another staff member came and explained the correct way to set it up! I wanted to tell them that I don’t need a stepladder or a ladder—if you’ll allow me, I’ll just climb the tree. It was a familiar experience!
Managing Service Capacity
Up to this point, as I said, our visit felt very familiar, and picking oranges was the closest thing that came to mind. On the way into the orchard, a kind, elderly woman on the staff guided us to grab buckets and head in. Since there were several of us, we told her that just one bucket would be enough and that we didn’t want to pick more than a single bucket of fruit. She smiled warmly and said: “Oh! Yes, I understand! But these buckets aren’t just for picking! We use them to count the number of people inside the orchard!”
I was stunned! Wow! What a clever idea! Managing the orchard’s admission capacity with buckets! What an amazing little lesson!
It reminded me that David J. Anderson, in the introduction to his book on Kanban, gave an example of the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo. He wrote that the museum staff use a simple yet effective Kanban system to manage visitors. On entry, they give each visitor a card (like a playing card or a student ID), and take it back on the way out. Whenever these cards ran out (the garden’s capacity was full), visitors had to wait behind the entrance gate until cards were returned. How wonderful!
Afterword
I think to myself that the world is full of things to learn! I can learn from any phenomenon and from anyone—even from a visit to a fruit orchard! I hope I am a talented student.
“Kanban is neither a software development methodology nor a project management approach.” — David J. Anderson
