Before ProducePak Farm ERP

After ProducePak Farm ERP Implementation

Budgeting and projections was difficult or non existent.

Budgets can be prepared for each area of land using a selected variety and “what if” analysis provides management with the ability to choose production plans.

Resource (materials and labour) was difficult to project.  We were using spreadsheets to do this.

ProducePak provides comprehensive  resource projection as part of the Budgeting module.  Both labour and materials can be accurarately predicted down to the individual product. 

Budget monitoring was difficult and not real time due to the time it took to enter information onto spreadsheets and financial package

ProducePak Budgeting module provides real-time, daily budget monitoring.  Budgets can be broken down to specific areas of land or monitored over a produce type, variety, farm, block, or site.

Planning staff activities was time consuming and often inaccurate

Using the Farm Diary, we can now plan staff tasks in advance, including Planting, Spray, Harvest, Irrigation, Inputs, and all other tasks.  Staff can be given the tasks on daily printed worksheets or on a PDA on which they record any deviations from the plan.

Monitoring & Accuracy of farming tasks was inaccurate and often recorded too late or incorrectly, or goes unknown until its too late to make a decision. 

Staff now record their tasks on printed timesheets or PDA.  This information is synchronised with ProducePak and gives management instant alerts to any potential problems in the farming process.  Recording of quantities of batch numbers and quantities of materials used (including labour) during tasks is now much more accurate and recorded quickly or in real time. 

Accuracy of inventory and its accountability was low.  Often we had different levels of inventory than expected, and often inventory would go missing with no accountability.

Staff now record the batches of inventory used, and quantities directly into ProducePak via PDA (or worksheet).   From most of our warehouses our staff have to “check out” inventory, so we know who used which resource and if they are expected to return any the warehouse manager is alerted.   We have now reduced inventory shrinkage and loss, reducing our costs.

Often we would need a resource such as a chemical or fertilizer and it would not be available.

We now set minimum levels inventory items and the warehouse manager is alerted when it needs ordering.

Traceability of material inputs to a crop was very difficult.   To perform a recall of a crop based on a batch number or invoice number of a contaminated input would require us to search potentially hundreds (or thousands) of worksheets to identify application areas. 

When staff perform their tasks now, they record batch details of any materials into the task, with just a few clicks we can find out where a resource was used, and the details of any produce that was harvested from the production areas. 

Training staff compliance for our standards was time consuming and had to be repeated over and over again (we use BRC and GlobalGAP on the farms)

Processes in ProducePak enforce the processes for GlobalGAP and BRC (and others); meaning we don’t really need to train the staff on these points because they are being forced to comply.

Farm managers often had difficulty knowing the progress of each team; resulting in missed opportunities to take corrective actions.   Often farm managers would spend a lot of their time on the phone trying to figure out what the status of work is. 

ProducePak centralises all farm task information allowing for a central monitoring system where each farm manager can instantly see the progress of staff and tasks and make immediate corrections or adjustments where necessary.  

PHI intervals would sometimes be missed by farm managers, resulting in potential breach of PHI compliance. 

ProducePak now graphically shows farm managers the PHI periods and doesn’t allow re-entry or Harvesting where there is a PHI constraint.  It is now virtually impossible for a PHI breach to occur. 

Purchase Orders for materials were sometimes informal and not properly approved, and often multiple managers would over order the same materials.

We now have centralised PO management, and stopped multiple staff from over ordering.  All Purchase Orders are now approved by management, and exported or financial package.       

Stock takes on materials (inventory) would not be performed often enough due to the difficulty in performing them.  Often we didn’t really know what our “estimated quantity” of materials was.

We can now perform stock takes by site, depot, or inventory category.  The PDA can be used to perform stock takes or we can print stock take sheets and enter the “actual” values after performing the stock take. 

Staff retention has always been an issue on our farms.  Each time a staff member left, we would have trouble training a replacement.

ProducePak now gives the staff their work processes and instructions.  When we have a new staff member, we simply show them how to use the small part of ProducePak that applies to their tasks, and ProducePak guides them through their work and alerts for any mistakes.

Often we would have nasty cash flow surprises where we had miscalculated the quantity of materials or used more materials during production due to environmental or pest reasons.

ProducePak gives us daily reports on our use of individual materials that is over the predicted (budgeted) amount.  The cash difference can be seen quickly and appropriate action can be taken.

Implementing best practices was often time consuming and these practices were often forgotten by our staff if we didn’t continually harass them into using the methods. 

The Farm solution guides staff through their tasks and requires them to ‘tick off’ each process or duty as it is being done.  This forces the staff to do things the way we want them done, and alerts us if they try to perform tasks incorrectly. 

Before ProducePak Packhouse Management

After ProducePak Packhouse Solution Implementation

 Packing costs for each batch were often unknown.   We pack for our own farm and other farmers, so we need to know how much it was costing for each farmer. 

 Using ProducePak Packhouse we can now see the packing costs of each batch, including labour and materials seperately.  We now use this information to determine the price we will pay the farmer for their goods if the produce was not from one of our own farms. 

Packaging materials were unaccountable and often wasted materials were not properly accounted for. 

Packaging material is now automatically consumed by ProducePak every time we create pallet contents; this keeps an automatic balance of materials.  Wasted materials are now entered via stock take, so we know if there are any deviations.

Traceability through the packhouse was not “100%” accurate.  Sometimes we would mix produce from different origins (or farmers) and this would not be reflected on our paper based traceability. 

ProducePak allows us to use PDA’s to scan barcodes (issued by ProducePak when we the produce arrives) to add it to the batch. 

On occasion, produce would be added to a batch, and we didn’t know which batch it was added to.

We can mix as many origins of produce and still maintain absolute 100% traceability throughout the entire process. 

Digging up traceability records could often take a few hours just for one batch, and was often not very accurate. 

We also put a batch number on the finished product, if the consumer ever has a problem with the quality or traceability of the product, we can now produce a Batch Traceability Report instantly, which shows us full details of the origin and who packed it and when.

Management of raw produce was often prone to error, and occasionally unnecessary waste where produce was not packed in the correct order.

ProducePak allows us to easily see and report on all raw produce on hand, when we add it to a batch ProducePak suggests what produce should be packed first (maintaining FIFO); this feature can be overridden by management where necessary. 
We can now see if we have enough produce to pack our orders, and what the potential excess or shortage will be.
We now experience virtually NO raw produce waste due to staff error. 

Many activities in the packhouse would be written on paper or spreadsheets by packhouse staff, then later entered by administration staff.  
For example the dispatch process would be written down three times. 

Information is entered only once now, directly into ProducePak.  Most of this information was entered multiple times.
The dispatch process is streamlined by allowing staff to use the PDA to scan the pallets that are being dispatched, and scanning them one final time at the physical point of truck loading. 
This PDA process replaces several paper documents, and now means our administration and marketing staff have real time access to information. 

Labeling of incoming raw produce, pallets , and finished product was often inaccurate and makeshift. 
We were using a separate program to print barcodes, a spreadsheet for pallet labels, and hand written labels for incoming raw produce. 
This resulted in many errors by staff, and the problem that the labels are not automatic and integrated into a traceability database. 

ProducePak now prints our labels automatically at every step throughout the packhouse.   The labels all have barcodes and human readable information. 
There are no more mistakes on labels in our packhouse, and everything is automatically generated such as pallet numbers, and stock arrival numbers.

Pallet management was suffering from inaccuracies due to our hectic packhouse environment often resulting in dispatch staff consigning pallets on a non FIFO basis. 

During the dispatch process, ProducePak will suggest to staff which pallets should be added to which order.  If the pallet does not match the orders specifications for quality or quantity, the staff member is alerted during the consignment process when they scan the pallet label.   
We now have absolutely zero errors during consignment, and every day we can see the exact status of orders, allowing us to know if we can send staff home or not. 

Quality control was often missed or not performed properly, and packhouse management would only find out about this at a later stage. 

We usually perform a QC on each outgoing pallet, on at least 12 random cartons form each batch, and on stock arrival (raw produce incoming). 

We can now perform QC using the PDA on the stock arrival process.  We use a PC on a QC station in the packhouse to test finished product, and the PDA to perform QC on pallet dispatch. 

The results are now quantifiable and we can see performance of individual packers and know what they need retraining for.  All QC is now monitored easily by management and we can see if anything was missed.