Chris Nealon, Operations Manager
My name is Chris Nealon, I’m the Operations Manager here at Koala Cherries. The quality here at Koala Cherries is paramount to everything we do.
ABCpacker is 100% accurate. Data integrity follows through to invoicing, dispatching, and all our reporting post season. It’s really important for us to be able to get the data out of ABCpacker in all sorts of variety of ways. Then we can drill down in and out of all different sorts of data, and even crossover; so our data from ABCgrower and ABCpacker, we can then pull out and utilise for all different sorts of reports. Our sales team want to look at some specific concept of the way our fruit’s moving across the world, or our production team want to be able to see how our packing is going, so we can really drill in and out of that data. Thanks to the integration between ABC and other platforms it makes it really simple.
We do a lot of export as well as domestic sales and ABCpacker is great at being able to give us the type of documentation we need for an export customer versus a domestic customer. For our export markets we need to provide a specific commercial invoice that has all the correct information to meet all the country’s requirements.
On the domestic side we do a lot of EDI (electronic data integration) between our customers. We deal with all the major supermarkets in Australia, and all of that is B2B (business-to-business) data exchange. Our orders are through ABCpacker. We get all of our paperwork, our pallet labels, our SSCCs [Serial Shipping Container Codes], all of that information that’s required by the supermarkets comes out of ABCpacker.
We can seamlessly transition from farm to packhouse to freight to sales to customer with minimal data entry points, and I think that’s the key bit, is that then there’s less potential for mistakes, plus you can track your fruit.
Our traceability is second to none. Every quality assurance audit we have across multiple different platforms of quality assurance, when we go through our traceability to show our auditors it’s perfect and they are always impressed at how easily we can track both ways, so from customer back to farm, or from farm to customer. It’s a simple process.
Leigh Turnbull, Farm Manager
Hi, I’m Leigh Turnbull, I work at Koala Cherries as a Farm Manager. I manage five farms over about 80 hectares, which is equivalent to about 70,000 trees.
We’ve been using ABCgrower now for around five years. When we get pickers on site we use ABCgrower to track their start time and finish time and the information is really accurate. When we’re out in the field with the pickers they have their QR codes on their lugs or totes and we can just go through and scan that, and enter in how many we’re picking up for that pickup, and that records not only the lugs that they’ve picked but the variety or the block that they’re picking in, so we can capture our yield data from that as well.
You can use a PDA device, which is what we use, it’s all offline and then once you get back into network data you can upload the information from there.
It gives a good level of traceability and compliance and also yield data. You can see that there were a lot of scans done in one particular area, so you know that your levels are a lot higher, so if you’re picking up a variety in a row and it’s been scanned in a different row you can track back to that and find that.
Once the information’s been uploaded to the cloud, the managers’ go back to start using it to work out their rates and even track productivity and yields and stuff like that. [It shows] kilos picked, and the cost per kilo to pick it, so it does all the conversion for that with the rates that you enter in and then it converts it back to price per kilo to pick it.
If you have any troubles the support back at ABC is next level. Really easy and they get back to you pretty quickly.
Chris: Every hour is critical – we have such a short harvest. The primary thing is knowing the system is reliable. It’s got to be reliable and really robust.
We’ll ask ABC if they can help and I can’t remember a time when they’ve said they can’t help. We’ve got to know that we’ve got someone who can help us fix it, because we’ve got to fix it quick. And that’s why we trust ABC to work with us to send cherries all around the world.
