Reducing the Time for a Freezing Shop to Reach Full Capacity at the Start of the Fishing Season

( Vol-12,Issue-4,July - August 2026 )

Author(s): Andrii Kalinichenko

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Page No: 038-045
DOI: 10.22161/ijaems.124.4

Keywords:

freezing shop, plate freezing, fishing season, seasonal ramp-up, onboarding.

Abstract:

Seasonal seafood freezing shops often enter the fishing season with installed freezing capacity that cannot be used immediately because part of the crew is renewed, task routines are unsettled, and handoffs around chamber loading, unloading, case-up work, and maintenance escalation remain unstable. This paper develops an authorial workforce-readiness methodology to reduce the time required for a freezing shop to reach full-capacity operation during partial seasonal crew renewal. The methodology differs from conventional approaches focused mainly on equipment readiness, refrigeration capacity, or general onboarding because it treats seasonal ramp-up as a combined supervisory system of guided task entry, adjacent-task rotation, and fixed communication signals tied to chamber continuity. The applied case comes from a 15-chamber plate-freezing shop in Kodiak, Alaska, where each chamber has a stated capacity of 2.5 tons and the operating target reaches 85 tons per 12-hour shift. Practitioner-reported operating indicators show that the integrated routine reduced the ramp-up period from roughly 2 weeks to 3–4 days, corresponding to a 71–79% reduction in time to stable, full-capacity work. The proposed model is transferable to other seafood-processing plants with compressed seasons, high crew renewal, manual loading pressure, and recurrent early-season coordination losses. Its practical value lies in giving freezer leads and plant supervisors a structured method for converting installed freezing capacity into stable daily output before all seasonal workers reach full individual proficiency.

Received: 13 Jun 2026; Received in revised form: 10 Jul 2026; Accepted: 14 Jul 2026; Available online: 18 Jul 2026

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