We’re excited to let you know we have released a brand spanking new online Help manual. It’s comprehensive, up-to-date and covers all modules in ABCgrower and ABCspray.
It’s accessed the same way as the existing manual. Click the question mark icon to the right of the top blue banner in ABCgrower. Whether you consider Help manuals your first port of call, or your place of last resort, check it out, it is helpful!
Welcome to your Autumn issue of Grow IT. We hope your harvests are fruitful and that you can take a few minutes out to catch-up on the news…
We’ve got a fully-packed newsletter for you – enjoy!
Sharon and the ABC team
It’s not long until April 28th which is when the new ruling in Australia for paying horticultural pieceworkers a minimum wage comes into effect. We appreciate that for many this will mean more time spent on payroll and less time on the produce. You also may be considering dropping piece rate payment altogether. Help is at hand.
ABC delivers an easy-to-use solution which manages the minimum wage guarantee already – ABCgrower gives visibility to piece rate costs and the top up costs where the piece rate payments fall short of the required hourly rate. The solution provides multiple ways to record worker time, now required for pieceworkers as a consequence of the new legislation. The ABCgrower Mobile App works offline to record information on the farm or in the shed without an internet connection.
Get in touch here or call Sharon on +64 21 223 6991 if you have any questions – we’re happy to help you.
Fertigation is the third type of electronic diary entry in ABCspray, joining Spray Instructions and Dry Applications.
ABCspray accommodates the differences between the three agrichemical application methods. Your block/valve configurations are held in ABC for easy selection, and fertigation over multiple days is supported. You have visibility to the amount of nutrients that have been applied to your blocks season to date as you build your instructions, and the volumes contribute to the Nutrient Analysis table which gives visibility to nutrient application on your farm.
Read more here and if you have questions, get in touch here.
While you’ve been busy harvesting, we’ve launched a new website. It was time for a refresh so we’re excited to have a great new logo to go with the rebranded website. Check it out here and let is know what you think.
There’s a really useful Productivity Bonus calculation tool as part of ABCgrower which can be used to encourage and reward your top performers!
Collect by piece for valuable productivity information, use the Convert to Hourly tool to change the piece rate information to an hourly pay rate, and use the Productivity Bonus calculation tool to apply an additional payment to reward your best workers.
The Productivity Bonus calculator includes a weighting function to account for differences between blocks, for example higher numbers of trees pruned would be expected in a block with young trees compared to a block with older denser trees pruned on the same day. With visibility to individual’s productivity it is easy to identify top performers and you set the productivity threshold required to earn a bonus payment.
Together, these tools provide an alternative to piece rate while retaining a motivator for high productivity. It is particularly useful where your workers have disparate skills and it is difficult to set an appropriate piece rate.
If you have questions, get in touch here.
We were delighted that Wim van Niekerk was invited to speak at the Citrus Technical Forum 2022 about ABC. Wim uses ABCgrower’s top-up function to ensure pieceworkers are paid minimum wage, and the productivity information grower provides has meant big savings on the bottom line. We are very appreciative of Wim and his team!
Our founder Sharon is heading to Australia in April! Sharon will be on the road in Australia and if it’s possible, would be happy to swing by for a chat about how to gain time and cost savings and productivity increases in your business. Get in touch with Sharon here.
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Did you know you can set a default container printer? Whether your organisation has one label printer or a dozen of them, setting a default printer means you don’t have to select the printer when you go to print container labels. That’s one less step every time you print your labels.
Go to Settings > User > click your Username, and then choose the printer from the Container Printer dropdown list. Click Save and it’s done! If you don’t have user management permissions ask your manager to do this for you.
Now when you go to Inventory > Print Container Label the Printer field will be pre-populated with your printer.
It’s not set in stone though, so if you did need to choose another printer the dropdown list remains available to you.
‘Work Date From’ is a common filter in ABCgrower, like in Worker Activity Search for example. It’s set to 3 months by default, but you have control over this.
Go to Settings > Control and change the setting in Work Date Default. To set the default to the current date leave the field blank. Just be aware that this setting applies to all users across all searches, so check with the bill payer first!
Wim van Niekerk, Managing Director Widem Farming, has been invited by Citrus Australia to speak about ABC at the upcoming forum. Wim already uses ABCgrower’s top up function to ensure pieceworkers are paid minimum wage, and the productivity information grower provides has meant big savings on the bottom line. We are very appreciative to Wim and his team!
Published BayBuzz January/February 2022
Hawke’s Bay is home to around 18,000 businesses, a fair few of them owned or managed by women. Meet four incredible women entrepreneurs all with a tale to tell, and hard-won, practical experience to share.
For inspiration, read on.
Sharon Chapman, ABC Software
We have software products for the horticulture industry, namely packhouses and orchards. We have clients in NZ, Australia, US and Denmark. In the last four years, we have transitioned from a custom software development company to a company with software products for sale. We still do tailor-made software, but our primary focus is on our product sales.
Our software goal is to make the hard, easy; the complex, simple; the time-consuming, fast. Obviously, this is not always possible but when we get even halfway to that goal, it can be a game changer for our clients. And we back all that up with outstanding customer support!
Initially COVID had little to no impact. We easily worked from home and all our clients were essential services (growers and packers) so work continued uninterrupted. Now, 20 months on, not being able to travel to Australia is having an effect on new sales. I also get the feeling of general jadedness in the markets that is slowing adoption of change and innovation.
Nike say it best: ‘Just do it’. It is understandable to be afraid to think of all the things that can go wrong. But when you move from thinking about it, to talking about it, to action, all those doubts take a back seat because now you are in action.
And if it isn’t, don’t worry (it’s bad for your health), just adjust, segue, reinvent, U-turn. Life is meant to be fun. If it isn’t, change your thinking.
People who get out of their comfort zone, shake up the tree. People who are passionate and inspire others with their words and actions (as opposed to brow-beat or intimidate). Greta Thunberg and the innumerable climate warriors making a difference, like the HB-grown Project Do Less (www.projectdoless.nz) and Action Station Aotearoa.
I’m at the point where I am working around 40 hours a week. That gives me time for family, friends, fitness and personal space. Because I am single and no children at home, I have the privilege of really being at no one’s behest. Personal time is mine and for me to use or squander. I ditched TV long ago, which is a great giver-back of time. I would like to work less hours but with our product development we are really a start-up company (which cracks me up) and it needs all the nurturing and attention any toddler would require. Personal and work life kind of blend. I’ve got it pretty sweet. And I’m having fun.
When you open the main menu in ABCgrower you can click the pin icon to always have it visible. The main pane will resize to suit.
This is especially handy if you’re part way through entering information and want to check something. Rather than navigating away from where you are and losing the information, open the menu, right click on the item you want and select Open link in a new tab. Now, you can go back and forth between tabs, no problem!
We listen when you tell us what you need and we're constantly improving your software.
After a release it is good practice to press Ctrl+Shift+R on your keyboard. This ‘hard reset’ clears the cache, making for smooth sailing ahead.
Ahead of changes being made we pop a notice up on the home page to say that ABCgrower will be briefly unavailable very early in the morning while the developers work their magic.
Then we add Release Notes that tell you what we’ve been up to. A number on the bell icon indicates unread notifications.
Click on the bell to see a list of notifications. Then click on a notification to open the Release Notes. This is where we share the update news.
Heading into harvest often means a new bunch of pickers. It's easy to 'deactivate' last seasons pickers in ABCgrower and start afresh.
Marking workers as ‘inactive’ means you’ll no longer see them in lists, so you won’t have to scroll through all the departed workers to find your current team members. All records are retained and you can always choose to see inactive workers.
Scott Griffin, Rockit Global’s General Manager of Operations, says the ABCpacker programme that records and reports on the traceability of apples from orchard to finished goods “has worked well for us. It’s played a big part in getting Rockit to the stage that it is.”
Rockit Global grows, packs and sells miniature apples packed in unique tubes. Its apples are grown under license agreements in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Belgium, and are now available year-round in more than 30 countries. Turnover is up over 25 percent year on year. Formed in 2012, ABC came on board in 2015 to help with packing inventory and traceability through its ABCpacker programme. Over the intervening years, the ABC team has worked closely with Rockit Global staff to tailor the software to match the growing business’ needs.
Meeting the regulatory requirements of market access to the ever-expanding number of export countries is “extremely important”, says Sarah Duncan, Quality & Compliance Manager.
Kay Lorimer, Logistics Manager, agrees. “Market access is the key for us. The software certainly manages the key requirements we have for market access, which is huge.” She notes that the integration of ABC with NZ Apples and Pears means that shared information “closely flows through into our system”. “Our phenomenal growth has meant our software has had to grow with us,” says Sarah. “ABC is very supportive and proactive in developing the software to meet our needs as we grow.”
“Everything can be customised, it’s not something that’s a flat package where you can’t make any changes. We can dive in and make it exactly how we want it for all our users, which is a benefit of being able to work closely with them.” Supply Chain Manager, Dennis Paxie, agrees. “The flexibility of the software and the support of the ABC team has made a big difference in helping us grow. An off the shelf solution wouldn’t have enabled this due to the nuances that we need in our sort of operation.”
The “wealth of knowledge” ABC has of the horticulture industry is another plus for the company, Kay says. “They’ve been doing this for a long time, and we are a relatively new company. We know what the problem is, and they know how to solve it. They’ve been there before, seen it before, and know what needs to be done. They offer solutions that we can customise to suit us.” The responsiveness of the ABC team is seen as another strength. “We just pick up the phone and they’re there. We get answers really quickly, and if they need to come back to us, we’re not left hanging for days on end,” says Kay.
Rockit Global’s off-season provides a short window for enhancements to be made to the software, and 2021 has been a big one ahead of its state-of-the-art packhouse, coolstore and office facility in Irongate, Hastings getting into full swing. Having not managed its own fruit storage before meant pallet scanning and other systems needed to be trialled and tested to ensure everything is located where it should be. A full despatch module has integrated the sales and logistics teams to provide better visibility and allocation of fruit into specific markets. The tracking of all packaging elements for the vastly increased packhouse throughput has also been strengthened.
In a separate project, Production Manager, Michael Kelly worked with ABC Software to ensure the company could provide full traceability on fruit for the Japanese market. As fumigation is required, a remote team under his supervision must unpack and then repack the fruit to meet that country’s regulations. “It works exactly as I need it to, and frankly makes my job a lot easier.” During the previous season, tracking had been done manually on spreadsheets, which Michael says, “was extremely difficult”. “We contracted this need to ABC to automate and now it runs seamlessly.”
All agree that working with ABC Software is a pleasant experience, citing good clear communication, responsiveness, and the willingness to “nut things out together”.
