ABC Software has made an amazing difference to our business
Customers talk about the real benefits ABC Software has made to running their business.
MA Orchards use ABCgrower to manage every aspect of growing honeycrisp apples. General manager Morten Tonder, Carla Clelland and Luke Upfold talk about how the software makes a difference.
Morton Tonder, General Manager
My name is Morton Tonder, and I am the General Manager at MA Orchards. We use ABCgrower as our hub for managing the crop and the people, payment, productivity, budget, and follow up. That’s ABC, that is at the centre of it all.
In 2018 we were still using a paper record, and I was spending a little time searching for systems because back home in Denmark where I came from that was all already IT based. So, I looked at a couple of options and one of them was ABC, and after quite a lot of research we found out that ABC was the right place for us.
Obviously, the harvest is the peak; it’s the pinnacle of what we do all year, but it’s also where we’ve got the most staff. We have about 450 people coming in and it’s a small team of 17 permanent staff that are training, employing, paying, and organizing all the staff to come in and pick the crop: 16,000 bins in 3 weeks.
Luke Upfold, Production Manager
My name is Luke Upfold. I’m the Production Manager here at MA Orchards. My job is to look after the staff that are involved in production activities like picking, pruning, thinning, and those kinds of things.
We grow Honeycrisp which is a high value apple variety that we export to the United States. We grow our trees high density. We know how many meters of branch we have in this orchard. We know how many buds we have in this orchard. And we do everything by the numbers. We use ABC for just about everything that we do that is work related.
Carla Clelland, Technical Manager
Hi, my name is Carla Clelland. I’m the Technical Manager for MA Orchards. The Technical Manager does a lot of things. A lot of my work is around crop estimation, in terms of how we’re going to grow the volume of fruit that we need for our customers and obtaining the correct quality for that fruit also. ABCgrower helps us a huge amount. I’m not sure how we would do it without that level of detail and information.
[ABCgrower] also helps us a lot with our compliance work. It fits in quite nicely with our traceability systems on the orchard. We use ABCgrower throughout the year. Everything from spraying for our agrochemical instructions through to tracking inventory. It’s a really integral part of our business.
MA Orchards produces a very large number of bins of fruit each season. ABC is the tool that we use to preprint our labels and then, as they’re applied to the harvested bins they’re scanned in, and that gives us a full traceability system right back to where that fruit has been picked which ticks all of our compliance requirements. And also for planning when we need to order trucks and cool storage space. It gives us the full picture of where that fruit is and where it has come from which is absolutely fantastic.
Morton: We also use ABC as a coolstore management system. The whole store has been setup in ABC with row, location and column, and we scan it into these locations using the same barcode system.
When we decided to use ABC, we found Sharon [Chapman] and the team very responsive to changing data and systems, so it fitted us in a good way.
ABCspray, ABCgrower
Fruitico labour manager Kevin Dell’Agostino and farm manager Craig Dell’Agostino find ABCgrower and ABCspray allows them to efficiently manage a large and diverse workforce.
Craig Dell’Agostino, Farm Manager – Southern Vineyards
I’m Craig Dell’Agostino, I’ve been with Fruitico five years now. My job title is Farm Manager for the southern vineyards. The vineyards down here Hamel and Coolup combined are 230 hectares with seven grape varieties that Fruitico grow; our main one being Autumn crisp which is a very common grape. It’s the one that everyone wants, it’s the biggest exporter.
With [ABCspray], the beauty of this product is it allows us to create a spray sheet for the staff, tailor-made for our conditions. And the beauty about it is that it stipulates what they actually need to do prior to mixing that tank, their bar pressure, and it’s very, very clear the chemical that we’re using, the tank rate that we’ve got, our litres per hectare. They can actually tick off that a tank’s been mixed, and they can work down towards finishing the actual sheet.
Personally, ourselves, we order our chemicals based on this, and we’re pretty much nearly bang on every time. So, it helps us order our chemicals and make sure what we’re putting out is actually going out at the correct rate. We need compliant-ready records in case we’re get an audit. If we get a pest management guy come through, and say he’s found some pests out there, and what have we done about it? We can go back into ABC, and we can pull up those dates, and we can show that we’ve actually implemented a spray program to suit.
Kevin Dell’Agostino, Farm Labour and Harvest Manager
My name is Kevin Dell’Agostino, I’m involved with the labour management side of Fruitico here in Waroona.
Through our harvest period we’ll be anywhere up to about 500 staff. We do find ABCgrower easy to use. It allows us to get an overview of data and statistics within the business, where our staff are, how long the staff are in each block, [number of] units, and basically to be able to pay our staff correctly.
It was a really big benefit that we could go offline with it and come into a space at a later date and shift that information on that scanner – upload it.
On its way through to the paying system it has a verification. Not only do we have a check or an overview on that, but the system is running it in the background as well. It’s all about reporting and getting that data through so you can make better decisions.
There’s a support team there all the time. If you have any technical issues they can jump in the background and help you through them.
With it being online, I can be anywhere and log on and access the data, or help a staff member through a situation, so that’s perfect for us.
The data coming out of ABC gives us more clarity. We can definitely see where we can improve with our labour side, as labour for us is about 75% – 80% of our business [costs]. For the horticultural industry, we definitely recommend ABCgrower.
Jane Hebiton, Payroll and Data Analyst
My name is Jane Hebbiton. I work for Fruitico. We’re a table grape farm down in Waroona in Western Australia.
My work here at Fruitico involves organising the pays etc. and going through the data that we get from ABC, pulling out worker efficiencies and massaging it to get information that will help our farm managers better manage the labour force here. So, being able to pull that out into Excel and then manipulate it and do some data analysis on it, that is what I think is really powerful about ABC.
It’s one thing to be able to see something on screen, but to be able to pull it out and then save that data, track it, and graph it, so you can actually get more than just a snapshot in a particular time, you can actually start reading the trends. That’s really important for us.
It’s really easy to understand. The data that we get out is really great, and it’s about how you think about slicing and dicing it, and comparing apples and apples, and pears and pears, or grapes and grapes.
Kevin: I would be very unsure on how we are to track all this information, in the time frames that we do, without ABCgrower. They care about what they’re doing, and they want to improve it.
Chris Nealon from Koala Cherries uses ABCpacker in the packhouse and ABCgrower on the farm to comprehensively manage productivity and workflow during the short cherry season.
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.
ABC Software
The Avocado Collective CEO Joshua Franceschi has worked with ABC Software since 2008 using a customised turn key solution that covers every aspect of the business.
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.
ABCgrower, ABCspray
Kyle Tosana from Boyanup Fresh Blueberries talks about how changing to ABCspray and ABCgrower has made keeping accurate, compliant ready records easier and accessible at all times.
Kyle Tosana, Manager
Hi, my name is Kyle Tosana. I’m a blueberry manager at Boyanup Fresh Blueberries. I’m a second-generation farmer, and we love growing blueberries!
All our blueberries here are under net just to keep them protected from the pests and diseases that we get here. So far, we’ve got 16 hectares under net. The back paddock – we’re slowly expanding that. It’s got a total of 20 hectares that we want to expand more into blueberries.
Our picking months are usually around October through to December when the majority of our fruit is. Over a 12-month period, if we’re not picking, we’re packing. If we’re not packing, we’re checking the bushes and we’re making sure everything’s right out in the field.
We’re quite new to ABCgrower. It’s been very helpful for collecting data and being able to have the ability to introduce different contractors, being able to split [the different contractors pay information] up, whereas we never really had the ability to do it before. And they’re collecting the data of each individual person, and all in the click of a finger. The QR codes on the trays relate to that person, and each person has their own barcode that they use. It is a lot easier to track each individual worker, how many kilos they pick, and do all their time sheets, and make sure they’re getting paid for what they’re actually picking.
The transition from our old system to ABCgrower was a little bit complicated at first. But once we were kind of getting familiar with it and learning the way the software works, it’s been really easy. Because of the simplicity with using ABCgrower, it has definitely made the payroll system and the reporting a lot easier than the way we used to do it. Our results that we’re getting from the reporting are very accurate.
ABCspray has definitely helped us in record keeping of sprays. We’ve been using ABCspray now for two years. We got it back in 2022, and it’s really great for the chemical records and compliance. It’s been really great for getting off the paperwork, into anything like my phone, my iPad and all that. Just to have it basically at your fingertips to know when you can spray and when you can’t spray. ABCspray links really well with ABCgrower because that allows us to be able to know when we can pick that particular variety that we’ve sprayed during our harvest months.
[ABC] have provided us with a lot of information, and a lot of helpful ideas as well. When we were looking around for different software, we inquired about a few {other] different platforms, but none really met our requirements for what we needed here on our farm. The team at ABC Software made it quite easy for us to make a decision.
ABCpacker
Fifth generation farmer Kirsty Fontanini from Fontanini Fruit & Nuts finds ABCpacker has significantly improved the workflow and accuracy of paperwork in their packhouse.
Kirsty Fontanini, Owner/Manager
I’m Kirsty Fontanini,
and we are fifth-generation farmers. We started using ABCpacker – I was
looking at several different options, and ABCpacker was the
one that really stood out to me. We have gone from a completely manual, handwritten,
duplicate book system. With ABCpacker, I was
able to start as small as I wanted, and I can add on the features as I want
them.
We used to get calls from the markets saying, “Oh, your
tally’s out. You’ve done this wrong. You’ve done that wrong.” And since
we’ve started using ABCpacker,
we haven’t actually had any call from the markets, which is really great.
It’s not difficult to use. It’s actually really, really
simple. The support has been amazing, and it’s actually really, really simple
to get your head around once you start using it live. I just had to do the
training, so it was all very straightforward.
Three years ago, we put in a new grading line. It was quite
a manual kind of an older system, and we upgraded, and we’ve put in quite a new
system. I was still handwriting the paperwork, and we were still doing all the
handwriting of the accounts and things like that. And I thought, we’ve upgraded
that one step, and now it’s time to go the next step and get some packaging
software. So, I did some Google searching. That’s when I started looking at ABCpacker and I
looked at a lot of their competitors, and ABCpacker was
definitely the one for me.
ABCpacker
does have a direct correlation with the traceability. It traces what comes in,
and it traces exactly what goes out, where that fruit came from, what day it
was packed. Compliance is just so important now, and to keep those records, and
to have something that does that easily and is just ready at your fingertips
with all that information is invaluable.
ABC
have been extremely adaptable. I have pretty much tailor-made the program to
suit how I want it to do things, and they’ve been very, very good, and it’s all
been very, very easy to actually adapt it to exactly how I want to use the
program. I mean, it’s even good for when we do audits, because we’ve got all
that traceability there of incoming, outgoing, without having to hand-write all
those records which is what we used to do. So, it’s touch of a button, it’s all
there. We can do away with so much paperwork, it’s great.
We are a small family operation. We want the capabilities of
the programs that we run to be able to grow with our business, and ABCpacker can
definitely do that. I would definitely recommend ABCpacker to other
people. I wouldn’t hesitate.
ABCgrower, ABCspray
Ladycroft Orchard manager Bec Whittaker and office manager Diedre Fagan both recommend using ABCgrower and ABCspray to anyone working in the horticulture industry.
Bec Whittaker, Manager
I’m Bec Whittaker, I manage Ladycroft Orchard in the southwest of Western Australia. Ladycroft Orchard has been using ABCgrower since 2019, ABCquality and ABCspray for our chemical spraying and fertigation.
ABCgrower is very easy to use. It’s made a massive difference to what we do. Our supervisors out in the paddock can do the data straight away on their phone through the mobile app. We don’t have reception in the south of WA here in this particular spot, so for our guys to enter all of the data into the phones and then come up to the office and upload it, it’s all done. It allows us to see exactly what they’re doing in the blocks. So, any job we’re doing in the orchard is recorded – per tree, per block, per variety.
From a management perspective I can see where the staff are fluctuating through the day and through the week, and we can move them and change blocks. Then all of that information we can send in a report straight to our head office.
With our picking we can have location services on on the phone and it will show us how many bins as we tag them in the row, how many bins are picked in that area, and then that comes back onto a live product productivity map, so we can see who’s picked what out of what block, what row, and how many bins each row has produced for that season.
We use ABCgrower from the start of our new build, new plantings, and that will tell us ground preparation to irrigation going in, trees going in, tree guards going on, …fertiliser. Every little aspect of planting a tree is recorded onto ABCgrower and then given as a report at the end of the planting. We can see per hectare how much it’s cost for a particular block build.
It’s been a fantastic decision coming out of the paper trail and wanting to go paperless ourselves, click of a button, upload, and it’s all there.
Deidre Fagan, Office Manager
I find ABCgrower extremely useful. Before we started using ABCgrower it was mainly on paper, which was trying to chase down people for time sheets – paper time sheets. If I go on to check the pay run, I can verify if there’s anything missing it shows up straight away. It’s so easy for me, like if I work from home I can just click onto the computer. Definitely happy with the ABC program, it’s brilliant.
Bec: When we’re using ABCspray it’s very visual for anybody, for the tractor drivers, for myself. The sheets are done, I can email that sheet straight to the operator, they’ll know exactly what they want. On the sheet it tells you how much of a certain chemical to put into a full tank, a part tank, how much water that is required, so it’s all there easy to see.
When we do a stock take, instead of going out and spending 3 – 4 hours in the chemical shed writing down all of the product we just click a button and within five minutes it’s already printed out. Done! The sheet’s there. For us, as the chemical is delivered, fertiliser delivered, we put it straight into the system and all of that is visible to our quality assurance program. It eliminates human error.
Deidre: I definitely would recommend ABCgrower to other users just because it’s so simple.
Bec: The ABC crew are fantastic, there’s never any issue.
ABCgrower
Johnny Milmine the General Manager at Berry Farms NZ says the benefits of using ABCgrower allows them to see exactly where the costs are right across the business.
Johnny Milmine, General Manager
ABCgrower allows me to have my finger on the pulse and see exactly what’s going on.
Garry Zovogiannis, Farm Manager
Having ABC with me is great because I can be out here on the farm, hands-on, and if I need anything I can just click on the app.
Lisa Rose, HR/Compliance & Administration
ABC is good in the sense that you can’t miss things, it’s pretty difficult to get wrong.
Johnny: We grow an assortment of soft fruit berries; strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. We’ve got 17 canopy hectares all under Haygrove tunnels.
In my role as GM, ABC allows me to pull up any report I want to, all the data’s in there right down to individual hours and individual pickers. The decisions that we can make from this data tells us whether we’ve got enough pickers, it tells us whether our productivity is right, which then allows us to forecast to our sales team, basically maximising our returns off the box.
Lisa: We have hundreds of workers throughout the season so ABC makes it really easy for us to enter them all individually and then also to organise them into teams so it means that we can make sure that the hours are entered together or individually if we need to.
Johnny: Using ABCgrower for us has benefited the business in the sense we can see where our costs are now. The types of businesses that would benefit from using ABC would be any horticultural business whether that’s strawberry growers, or berry growers like us, basically anyone that’s employing people that needs track costs.
Garry: We’re scanning up to a thousand trays a day to four different teams, and it’s all scanned into a system where it’s easy to be reallocated to a group of people. If you’ve got your scanning right, then there’s no room for error. ABC gives me great confidence; we use it every day and it’s pretty straightforward. It’s pretty easy to learn; I’m not that computer savvy myself and I picked it up in no time.
Johnny: I find ABC really easy to work with, always on the end of the phone or end of an email which saves us time and therefore adds efficiencies for our business.
Labour and harvest management on-farm that is fast, stable, and reliable throughout the season and is mobile, offline and cloud-based
Digital spray diary complete with consumables inventory management that is user-friendly, accurate and compliance ready
The total post-harvest solution in a single packhouse system. From farm to customer in a streamlined & simplified user friendly software
Here is the answer to the quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC) and reporting questions that’s focussed and flexible