Joshua Francesci, CEO
I’m Joshua Francesci, the CEO of The Avocado Collective. I started with the business in 2012 and been working here ever since.
The Avocado Collective formerly was known as Advanced Packing and Marketing Systems. It was founded in 2008 and in 2008 we developed a custom system with ABC Software and we’ve been with them ever since. So, ABC Software has been inherently a part of our business and our success. They’re a turnkey software solution for us, everything from inbound avocados to the finance and the money that we pay our growers back. They’re a part of our whole supply chain.
They’ve been incredible. I really find that the team at ABC Software, they really get business and the way that we pull things together. They are inherently hort-ag and that’s what makes them be able to tailor to the hort-ag industry so well.
They’ve managed to custom tailor a system for us that does everything that we need it to, and since 2008 when we’ve first got together the software has developed significantly in that time to allow for direct business-to-business invoicing and PO systems, to online management and warehousing systems, to an ordering system which handles all of our logistical orders from packing all the way through the customer endpoint.
They’re a huge part of what we do and one of the strong points I would say of ABC Software is their ability to tailor to every business’s need, We tend to find that we’ll have a review at the end of every season and we’ll focus on parts of the business that we’re trying to take some of the manual process out of, and then we work with ABC Software to build that into a better pathway for the business moving forward.
For a business as big as we are, we pack five and a half to six million trays a year, we’ll likely have 40 – 50,000 journal entries within our chart of accounts. For that we have an accountant and we have a bookkeeper, so we have two people on data entry, that’s it!
We work with a data analytics company here locally, and that analytics company works in mining and gas and construction, and they say that it’s some of the cleanest data that they look at, so [ABC] do a very good job of presenting the data in a format that we can pull together and make it meaningful for the reports that we’re looking for.
ABC has always been incredible giving us the technical solution, or the software solution, to go with our leading-edge high-tech systems that we use. ABC being based in New Zealand has quite a time gap between us and them, during daylight savings it’s 5 hours. Over the years they’ve implemented a servicing system that allows us 24/7 service and they perform perfectly.
We always recommend ABC Software as a solution for a business. They’re not the cheapest, they’re not the most expensive, but they give you exactly what you’re asking for. The main positive for working with ABC Software is that they take incredible care in making sure that they get the solution right, and it’s the incredible amount of detail they go to to make sure that the system works, that the application that you’re asking for does everything that you need it to do. They listen. They absolutely listen.
