Ken Moynihan: “Evolution of our technology is guided by the market and our customers’ needs”

New Zealand based company Compac offering famous worldwide integrated post-harvest solutions (grading, packing, turnkey solutions and services) has recently appointed a new CEO. Fructidor was lucky to meet the new team and understand why their machines are so successful and what the future plans of the company are as part of TOMRA.

Last October at PMA, Compac introduced the new product “Smartline” in partnership with Aveva. Chris Komatas, VP Product Management and Marketing at Compac, comments that it was very well received: “We already have a number of installations of Smartline and we have more to be installed. We continue to develop more features to give our customers greater control and better visibility of their operations in the packhouse.”

“We can only be successful if we understand our customers business very deeply”, - explains new CEO of Compac Ken Moynihan drawing on 15 years of experience at Compac. “We don’t design the machine and then search for its application. We work with our customers, partners to understand their problems and then we develop solutions to these problems. We are led by the market and our customers’ needs.”

Chris Komatas shares that the digital transformation throughout the packhouse requires much more customer understanding to plan for the new technologies and maximise their value. Mr. Moynihan adds that one important thing is to make sure that the packhouse is running all the time. A second thing is to make sure the packhouse is efficient all the time and it is making the right decisions: “Adding one cent to the value of each piece of produce on the scale of the packhouse ends up to a lot of dollars very quickly. We believe our technology allows you to extract more value from the crop than anybody else. In order to achieve this we make sure that technology runs near its peak performance”.

That is why Compac provides constant customer support: “We are deeply involved in proactive training, regular classrooms, season checking, plans for the season and how the staff are going to be trained, what skill levels they are at – this is a big change, which never used to happen before”, - remarks Ken.

Compac’s history goes back to the mid-1980s and there are 25-year-old machines that were upgraded and are running the latest technology. “Technology will continue to evolve and it is our job to evolve it. As we develop we make sure we take all our customers with us on this journey”, - explains Mr. Moynihan. “It is always the question from a new customer “why would I buy a machine today if you will release a new product shortly”, and the answer is because it adds value today and in the future we are able to upgrade it, adding more and more value”.

Outlining future plans, Ken Moynihan said that, with TOMRA Food, Compac has a big portfolio of new technologies that could be implemented in the produce industry and they are excited and look forward to using them.

For further information about Compac, please see www.compacsort.com.

Quick 2 minutes video report about Compac, TOMRA Food and BBC Technologies at Fruit Logistica can be seen here


For inquiries about machines and equipment:
http://www.compacsort.com/en/contact-us/