Kopenhagen Fur
April 19, 2007
Kopenhagen Fur is the world’s largest fur skin auction
house and the center of the international fur trade. Each year,
more than 16 million mink skins are auctioned off.
Approx. 200 people works manually and at automated
productions lines from November to June, readying the skins for
sale and delivery. According to type, sex, size, colour and
quality the skins are classified and sorted very carefully. The
last process in the grading system is the final grading which is
of incredibly great significance to the final result
 Automated processing of mink furs
For Kopenhagen Fur ProInvent and Videometer has developed
and delivered a production line for automated length
measurements of mink skins, a production plant for counting and
packaging of mink skins, and a system for automated color
sorting and grading of mink skins.
The input for the automated length measuring is carts with
mink skins of different lengths. The plant initially sorts out
the mink skins individually in order to perform a vision-based
length measurement into 10 categories. The skins then continue
to a sorting section in the line where skins of similar length
are sorted out into the same containers. The rationalization
gain in this line is considerable.
The special automated packaging plant counts, registers and
packs mink skins directly to boxes so that the skins are ready
for dispatch. The increase in productivity is enormous as to day
3 operators at 3 lines are able to handle more than 12,000 furs
an hour.
The colour sorting and grading system consists of 8
specially developed machines using the VideometerLine vision
technology. The sorting and grading of the skins need to be very
precise, because the customers at Kopenhagen Fur need to be
certain, that they get the quality they expect to get and they
have paid for. That demands that there is absolutely control
over the processes in the sorting and grading of the skins, and
that quality is an important part of the work procedures at all
times. It has actually always been like that, but with a new
certified Quality Management System at Kopenhagen Fur, combined
with the automatic sorting systems from Videometer, the
uniformity of the skin lots for the auctions is even higher to
day. It is not only the sorting and grading of the skins that
has been certified at Kopenhagen Fur - the company as a whole is
part of the certification. That has been done with an eye on the
future, says Managing Director at Kopenhagen Fur Torben Nielsen.
And the Production Director at Kopenhagen Fur Jesper Ulslev
adds: “the automated processing lines gives an outstanding
productivity with high repeatability and the Quality Management
System guarantees the uniformity of the sorting and grading
because the processes that will secure the quality are thought
thoroughly over and have been integrated in the company’s
intranet, where all employees have access to the information. We
could not have made the increase in the quality without the
automatic sorting system and we could not have made the
considerable increase in productivity through automation,
without the Quality Management System. Automation and Quality
goes hand in hand”
Production Manager Jesper Lauge says in explanation:
“measurement and classification of furs is a very challenging
task even for expert human sorters. The repeatability of the
expert human sorters is 56% from person to person and 65% at the
same person. A colour sorting machine is able to reproduce
itself with a repeatability of 68% and the repeatability is 63%
from machine to machine. The overall value of the total
initiative in the production, mainly the automated processing of
mink skins, came gradually over 8 years, and is to day a labor
saving of 130 people with an investment in equipment of
approximately DKR 60 millions. I.e. the pay back time is one
year, and the return of the investment is DKR 65 millions saved
every year”.
“Ten years ago many people believed that it wouldn’t be
possible to automate the color sorting because they thought that
what decides the sorting was an overall impression that could
not be learned by machines. Today the quality control is
independent of subjective judgments. The automatic sorting
systems combined with our Quality Management System perform a
razor-sharp sorting, and that gives us a foundation for the
future”, concludes Torben Nielsen.
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