TRACKSEAL SOLUTION IN FARMING

Farms have many challenges which consume lot of admin staff time, resulting in loss of productivity and hence the bottom line. One of the major challenges they had was to reduce the waiting time for pickers when waiting in line to handover the filled trays to the supervisor. In the peak season, sometime the waiting times was more than 30 minutes, resulting in less fruit being picked and hence less fruit going to market. This strawberry farm owner wanted to solve not just this issue, but many more. After talking to the farm owner, we came out with a solution to address all the challenges they had.

The Problems (Before solution implementation) –

Keeping track of large numbers of seasonal, itinerant workers
Accurately recording volumes of crop picked by each worker
Accurately recording number of punnets of different sizes being packed by packers
Providing accurate payment records for wages and salaries
Measuring yield from each farm
Managing equipment infrastructure on the farm
Measuring staff productivity
Measuring equipment usage and maintaining service records
To know who picked fruits in a crate
To know who is not picking a full crate of fruits
To know how much rotten fruit is being produced by each farm
How many crates are being picked in a day
The need for real time management information at your fingertips
And many more such issues…

The Result (After RFID solution Implementation) –

Staff members individually identified by RFID wrist band
Each crate individually tagged and tracked
Each staff member’s payment is calculated based on their actual volume picked/packed.
Hundreds of staff and thousands of harvesting containers easily tracked and associated
Staff productivity reports available in real time
No more manual record keeping of how many trays of fruits are being picked by whom and then entering the same in computer to calculate the wages. This now is automated, resulting in huge time saving and reducing data entry errors to almost zero. All this can be exported to Excel for record keeping
Scan a tray and find out who picked the fruits in this tray
Picker waiting time reduced to couple of minutes instead of 30 minute or so.
Picker and packers are able to see their activity count on the monitors
Report shows how many crates were picked on a given day
Report shows how many rotten fruit crates were picked during the entire harvest season
Instant management reports and performance statistics available on mobile devices
Reports on equipment usage and productivity

Financial Benefits of TrackSeal RFID Solution –

The administrative overhead associated with managing large numbers of seasonal workers in the very busy harvesting time is greatly reduced. Accurate recording of staff contribution enabled fair compensation and high quality records.
Management time is more effectively directed to more productive tasks and higher level decision making. Data available in real time provides guidance so that decisions are made on the basis of timely and accurate information.
The process of recording staff contribution and volumes harvested is achieved in seconds as opposed to minutes, increasing productivity.
More fruit is picked every day by the same number of workers resulting in larger quantity to market.
Data gathered is used as inputs to other farm management and financial systems (such as payroll).
Ensuring that utilisation of equipment and assets is optimised is greatly assisted by the use of RFID and reports highlight where economies can be made or services improved

Contact TrackSeal at info@trackseal.com or call us on +61 2 8091 0707 for more details on this solution or to find out how we can automate your farm processes.