Traceability: farm, packhouse, food manufacturing - Farm Traceability Systems

Farm Traceability Case Study > Solutions for traceability & cost management PTI

nospam@example.com (The Traceability Team) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:22:00 -0700

The Soktas group of companies includes a diverse range of enterprises based in Europe with export to multiple continents. Soktas farming specialises in citrus produce, with multiple areas of land under production. The following is a case study on their implementation of a solution to manage both costs, budgets, and traceability.

Challenges: Reporting on production costs for each orchard was difficult and often no up to date or accurate information was available for production costs defined to accurate areas of land under production. Inventory planning was time consuming and inaccurate, resulting in potential losses due to materials not being available or poorly substituted. Inventory usage defined to areas of land was inaccurate and nonexistent at times.

Requirements: Implement solution to accurately capture location of inventory consumption (to cost centre), inventory planning, farming task recording.

Solution Implemented:ProducePak Farm ERP, Farm PDA Mobile Solution

Improved cash flow,
accurate farm cost reporting,
enhanced inventory planning.

Main Benefits:
Production Cost Reporting: The Farm PDA mobile solution allows staff to capture the farming tasks performed on-site at multiple farms during the normal working process. This information is synchronised with ProducePak daily to collect new tasks and register completed tasks, allowing management instant cost reporting at any time. Farm managers are also now able to easily identify any potential problems with employee task performance.

Inventory Planning: The ProducePak Farm ERP solution provides the ability to predict required quantities of inventory and labour required during the farming process. Planning is performed by comparing a monthly materials analysis report to ensure just in time inventory delivery from suppliers and arrange labour resources.

Summary: Soktas obtained significant savings from improved response time for employee tasks. Inventory planning improved inventory availability and freed up cash flow due to better planning. Management now has access to new reporting tools allowing accurate analysis of costs for each orchard; this information is now used to make informed marketing decisions for sales of produce.

Source: www.ProducePak.com

Farm Traceability Solutions in Developing Countires / Emerging Markets

nospam@example.com (The Traceability Team) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:16:00 -0700

This document has been provided specifically to answer questions asked by companies in Developing Regions prior to implementation of a Traceability Solution. The Traceability Team is in the process of reviewing various Farm Traceability Solutions. The review below is just the beginning of the reviews we will conduct this year.

Product Reviewed: ProducePak Farm ERP

Why ProducePak?ProducePak has a long history of implementing projects in regions across both developed and developing regions. In particular, because this document concentrates on emerging markets, developing regions include Kenya, South Africa, Guatemala, and Egypt. New projects in 2010 include Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

ProducePak consultants have great experience with projects in developing regions making difficult projects successful ones.

The ProducePak solution helps to enforce international standards very quickly where the users of the system have little or no experience with computers or implementing food production, safety, and best practices in horticulture businesses.

In many cases, the ProducePak solution has been very successful during implementation where the users being trained have no experience at all with computers. A core feature of ProducePak is that the system “guides” the user through the best practice processes for safe and efficient food production.

ProducePak expert consultants provide ongoing support to clients in the form of email, phone, remote, and onsite training services; and also upgrades to the software every three months which will include new features, reports, and industry facilities to ensure international standards are always supported by ProducePak.

The on-site training process provides an expert ProducePak consultant that will manage the entire installation, configuration, deployment, and training for the project. This ensures a high degree of success for the project, and provides the best possible results and speed for the project.

Case Studies
To review case studies from developing regions using ProducePak, use this link http://www.producepak.com/pdf2/producepak-case-study-egypt.pdf
To review case studies from developed regions using ProducePak, click on this link http://www.producepak.com/pdf2/producepak-case-study.pdf

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Benefits from ProducePak Farm ERPThe following is a list of benefits from ProducePak Farm ERP systems.

• Improved management of production activity monitoring and budgeting
• Be alerted to deviations in budgets immediately
• Better planning of resources used in the production process results in higher cash flow utilisation and profit enhancement
• Automatic traceability systems reduce paperwork and staff time spent documenting chemical and spray application activities
• Inventory management reduces shrinkage and allows easy stock-taking; improving cash flow utilisation by maximising usage of on hand resources
• Compliance for; and Audits of HACCP, EurepGAP, GlobalGAP, ISO and other standards become easier and quicker by allowing auditors access to traceability systems
• For large businesses, central production management can easily monitor multiple farm sites from once central location; saving time, and improving management response to any issues in the production process
• Pre/Post Harvest Interval (PHI), Withholding Period management stops staff from harvesting product that is still within a holding period after the application of spray chemicals; potentially reducing the possibility of losses due to a recall or rejection of produce due to chemical residue issues

Other Benefits from ProducePak Farm ERP
• Easy recording of farm activities
• Easily assess the status of all outstanding farm activities from one central location
• Take rapid corrective action where tasks are missed or performed incorrectly
• Increased accuracy of traceability
• Capture HACCP, EurepGAP, GlobalGAP, ISO x, BCA, FarmCare information
• Increased control over materials used during production processes results in improved cash flow
• Automatic enforcement of PHI & withholding periods
• Increased control over inventory allows the business to reduce inventory waste and misappropriation; and improves profitability
• Enhanced inventory control allows the business to better manage the quantity of materials on hand, resulting in improved cash flow
• Rapid access to levels of production inventory on hand at any time; at each site and storage location
• Easy re-ordering of inventory
• Store managers are alerted when items need re-ordering
• When important staff take holidays or need to be replaced, their knowledge of normal operations is retained in ProducePak and can easily be accessed by management and new staff.
• Increase profitability by standardising production practices across the entire business
• Stops production staff from forgetting important tasks, resulting in increased yield and profitability
• Ensures correct quantities and methods are enforced, increasing business profit
• Allows the development and analysis of new production methodologies to improve production efficiency
• Rapidly Identify production mistakes and anomalies for production activities, allowing management to take corrective action; resulting in improved yield and profitability
• Become a ‘lean manufacturer’ by arranging materials and labour resources to be delivered Just In Time, maximising business cash flow
• Detect budget over/under runs immediately and take corrective action, resulting in improved cost control and profitability
• Make financial decisions and improve financial planning based on full budgeting information being available before each season starts
• Remove ‘nasty cash flow’ surprises that may result from a lack of budget planning and monitoring
• Compare profitability of selected production methodologies to choose new production methods; resulting in increased business profitability
• Comprehensive cost control avoids budget blow outs and allows management to be aware of any problems immediately

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Features of Farm ERP
Whilst there are hundreds of features in the Farm ERP solution, the following summarises the main features. Full details of the systems features can be downloaded from these links:
• Farm ERP System Specifications http://www.producepak.com/pdf2/ProducePakFARMMANAGEMENT.pdf
• Farm ERP System Demonstration http://www.producepak.com/pdf2/FarmERPSummaryProducePakSolutions.zip
• Farm ERP Mobile Solution Option http://www.producepak.com/pdf2/ProducePakFARMpda.pdf

Farm ERP Features • Comprehensive production task management for ALL production activities including Spray, Timesheets, Irrigation, Machinery Plant & Equipment Maintenance, Block Inputs, Planting, Harvesting, and more…
• Prepare production budgets prior to the start of each seasons growing, to improve materials, labour, and cash flow planning
• Monitor budgets on a daily basis to identify budget overruns and take corrective action
• Profit reporting down to individual areas of land at any time during and after the production process
• Automatically generate staff tasks and instructions to improve staff management
• Comprehensive activity monitoring systems to identify mistakes and deviations during the production process; allowing management to make corrective actions before incorrect practices or tasks cost produce quality/yield/profit.
• Automatic traceability of materials and labour used in production; instant recall from block, crop, and material inputs
• Comprehensive inventory management to improve resource utilisation and reduce waste includes traceability for inventory batches and integrates automatically with recall and traceability systems. Purchase Order generation, stock takes for multiple sites and depots,
• Mobile Farm Software allows staff to synchronise tasks to the PDA, record tasks and actual material consumption in the field, and then synchronise data with the ProducePak server back in the office; allows central monitoring of all staff activities at all times
• Integrate with Finance Package and Payroll
• Record Spray, Irrigation, Water, Planting, Block Inputs, Harvest, and virtually any task that is performed during production (contractors, soil tests, and more..)
• Plan tasks in advance or enter after they have been performed
• Costs are automatically allocated to each Block/Crop/Plot and area
• Multi-site enabled
• Recording of both Global and Site based overheads
• Automatically maintain traceability of materials used during production & automatic inventory allocation
• Generate staff/team instruction sheets
• View alerts for BHI / withholding periods etc
• Perform production cost analysis for each block
• Maintain labour traceability for all production tasks
• Visual display allows annual, monthly, weekly and daily views of production tasks filtered by selected Farm Site, or , Block, or Crop.
• Create Purchase Orders to acquire inventory
• Receive Inventory functions
• Perform multi-site stock takes, and or multi-depot stock takes
• Authorise the use of inventory from various storage depots
• Unlimited storage depots, at unlimited sites
• Batch number traceability
• Batch number recall processes
• Easy ‘pending delivery’ analysis
• Inventory “Check Out” and “Check In” logging to specific tasks, improves accountability and allows flexible control of inventory
• Easy logging of “evidence of consumption” recording for materials accountability
• Balances of inventory taken by each employee maintains accountability for task based farming activities
• configure the businesses standard production methods specify duration of tasks, materials used, labour used, equipment used
• trail, analyse and compare new production methods
• automatic scheduling of production tasks for each block for the entire season
• Monitor activities during production to compare ‘estimated’ with ‘actual’
• generate entire budgets for each block, before production commences
• trial different production methodologies to fine tune budget and cash flow requirements
• monitor ‘estimated’ and ‘actual’ budget during the production season
• Budgets by: Detail, Item, Category Summary, and Date Range
• Production Costs Reporting
• Production Profit Reporting

For further details on Traceability , Packing Software, Farm Software, Farm ERP, and Food Manufacturing please see:
Farm Packhouse . Farm ERP Farm Management Software Farm Packhouse Case Study Farm ERP ProducePakBIM Traceability Portal CCP Packhouse Software Crop Management Software Crop Traceability Farm Systems Food Traceability News Packing Solutions Farming Software Packhouse Management Farm ERP QTrace

Farm Software PTI > Farm responds to questions about implementing Farm ERP Solution

nospam@example.com (The Traceability Team) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:13:00 -0700

The following responses were given by a Farm when asked about each area of the business and how their recently implemented software solution has helped them to implement better management systems.

The "before" situation is in bold and the "after" situation is in italic.

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.

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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.

Case Study > Reduce farm costs & increase profits

nospam@example.com (The Traceability Team) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:25:00 -0700
Business: Torps Gard Farming Company
Country: Sweden
Business Type: Farming & Poultry

Farm Profile: Torps Gard has several decades in the farming industry, with Poultry being a recent addition to the traditional crop farming activities. Torps Gard is an environmentally friendly producer using green energy and precision farming across the operation. Torps Gard produces fresh produce meeting European (EU) standards.

Challenges:
Crop Farming: the farming operations were using paper and MS Excel based traceability which produced challenges during audits, duplication of data, and inaccuracy. Farming processes were difficult to budget for and up to date, real time reporting on production costs were unavailable or difficult to produce.
Poultry: A rapid production process for hundreds of thousands of animals, involving continual inputs, close monitoring of waste, and precarious balances between profit and loss during the production process. Task management and ensuring quality of yield was a major challenge.

Requirements: Increased farming monitoring and control to reduce waste, staff control to increase response time and product quality, staff management to reduce costs.

“Our business has increased food safety and quality management systems as a result of implementing ProducePak. The solution has allowed our business to improve operational efficiency and reduce operating costs through the softwares business management features; whilst ensuring our traceability and customer confidence in our product … “ Olof Oscarsson, PRESIDENT, TORPS GARD, Sweden

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Solution Chosen: ProducePak Farm ERP

Main Benefits from ProducePak Farm ERP:
Farm Activity Management: Farm Activities are managed and planned, providing standardised farming practices, with rapid management response to any potential issues during farming. Operational costs are now reduced due to automatic task scheduling and efficient use of labour resulting savings on labour costs. Waste created (due to losses of product or product quality) during the farming process has been reduced due to stricter employee activity control, resulting in further savings for the Torps Gard farming company.

Cost Control & Reporting: Instant cost reporting is now available for each farming area (or poultry house), providing management with up to date decision making information used in marketing, production management, and cash flow control.

Traceability: Farm inputs are now monitored automatically by ProducePak Farm ERP, creating an instant audit trail and traceability reporting conforming to international food safety standards, ensuring the security of the businesses quality certifications and customer base & confidence.

Summary: Torps Gard has increased profit and quality during its farming operations, with additional non tangible benefits including reduced management response time. Torps Gard clients are impressed and reassured with the new solutions in place; resulting in higher customer confidence and retention.

For further information on farm ERP solutions, please see www.FarmSoft.com , www.PackhouseSoftware.org , www.farm-software.net , www.FarmPlanning.org , www.farmsystems.org , www.ProducePak.com , www.ANPTechnology.com , www.mytoowoomba.com

Case Study > Reduce Farm costs & enforce PHI/withholding periods

nospam@example.com (The Traceability Team) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:14:00 -0700
Business Farm Frites
Country Europe, Middle East, Africa
Business Type Farm, Food Processing, Packing,

Business Profile: Established in 1971, Farm Frites is a leading producer, researcher, packer, and processor of various fruit and vegetable products exported world wide. With offices in over 13 countries, and farming operations in multiple continents, Farm Frites continues to develop new products, both fresh and processed, for markets in Europe, Middle East, and USA. The Farm Frites workforce comprises several thousand employees; many are experts in their respective fields.

Challenges: Product labelling wasn’t always convenient to include batch traceability number, batch traceability throughout packhouse could be inaccurate at times. Management of fresh produce inventory was paper based and suffered from inaccuracies which on occasion caused losses due to product spoilage or waste. Management of PHI (Post Harvest Interval)/withholding periods during farming operations was time consuming. Instructing staff on their farming tasks and the planing of initial tasks for farming staff was time consuming and inaccurate on occasion. Monitoring and following up the status of farm tasks was time consuming and inaccurate. Quality Control testing was inconsistent and the data produced was not quantifiable or easily analysed. Farming inventory suffered from shrinkage and recording of cost centres where inventory used was non existent.

Requirements: increase accountability of farming inventory and consumption, implement labour planning and control & monitoring system, implement automated QC, implement product identification system, improve packhouse inventory management and traceability of all produce and packing materials.

Increased food safety, reduced farm costs,
quantifiable & consistent
quality control

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Solution Implemented:
ProducePak Packhouse, Packhouse Mobile PDA with bar-code scanning, Quality Control, ProducePak Farm ERP

Main Benefits:

Product Identification : ProducePak provides the client with an array of labelling options which include batch numbers for all packed product.

Packhouse Inventory & Traceability: the solution reduces inventory waste, and enforces strict traceability via PC and PDA’s throughout the entire packing and processing operation using bar-code scanning and assignment of all produce directly to batch numbers.

Quality Control: Quality Control is now performed anywhere in the facilities using mobile PDA devices to scan product and enter quality control test results. The results are now useful for management to perform staff quality performance analysis, and product packing analysis for quality.

Post Harvest Interval Management: PHI and withholding periods on chemicals used during spray tasks now have automatic alerts for any potential breach of PHI and will disallow staff from harvesting produce that falls within a PHI withholding period.

Farm Task Planning, Instructing, Monitoring: managers can now plan and schedule tasks from ProducePak; quickly, and efficiently. Continual monitoring of farm tasks can be performed rapidly and quickly, highlighting any potential issues or incomplete or deviating tasks. Farm employees are instructed using tasks created in ProducePak, and labour consumption is assigned to each cost centre, increasing production cost reporting accuracy.

Farm Inventory Accountability, Waste, Accuracy: Farm inventory is now “check out” and “checked in” when being consumed from store rooms, this provides high accountability of all inventory consumed, and consumption is assigned to a cost centre and only authorised for “check out” if the employee has a corresponding farm task.

Summary: Savings in inventory shrinkage, management time, savings of product loss due to farm tasks not being performed (or performed at the correct time), extremely accurate and traceable product handling and inventory, quantifiable and useful Quality Control reporting, accurate and consistent Quality Control, and more…

For further information , please see www.FarmSoft.com , www.PackhouseSoftware.org , www.farm-software.net , www.FarmPlanning.org , www.farmsystems.org , www.ProducePak.com , www.ANPTechnology.com , www.mytoowoomba.com