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Jun 2021
Precision Data Solves Efficiency and Retention Issues
Maximise labour efficiency and retain high performing staff
With rising labour costs and shortages, it has become essential to maximise labour efficiency and retain high performing staff. Growers with a comprehensive and analytical approach are seeing improved staff happiness, employee productivity and higher profit margins. Anecdotal evidence on staff performance by managers doesn’t provide the full picture, with many gaps and scope for human bias. With the latest technology, it is now easier and more affordable than ever before to obtain comprehensive data to help to mitigate labour issues.
This data gives new insights into staff behaviour and habits, allowing staff to be recognised, rewarded and have their potential maximised. It also allows managers to effectively recruit and benchmark against a known profile of high performing employees and to compare across different sites. Staff can be directed to focus on the jobs that they are best at. Overall, staff are happier and are more likely to stay in their job, because they are accomplishing well defined, recognised goals and are able to finish work earlier to spend more time with family and friends.
Obtaining quality and detailed data used to be a time consuming, error prone and expensive undertaking. This involved either paper based recording systems, or expensive one size fits all vendor hardware. BumperCrop has taken a mobile-first approach so it is now affordable and easy. Widely available mobile devices are paired with WorkWave™ scanning tags to make data collection easy and highly reliable in any greenhouse setting. Operations can choose the level of data they want to collect, making rollout and change management easy. This also removes vendor lock-in, associated maintenance hassles and means the system automatically updates.
Growers can track their operations remotely from their PC, smart-phone or tablet or easily share data by harnessing BumperCrop’s open data platform. The platform has been built specifically for customisation, as operations often have differing processes and terminology to be catered to. For example, different reports are available such as time taken on rows, weight picked, or number of stems completed. Different varieties can also be seamlessly assigned and updated across rows.
BumperCrop’s Crop Management platform includes crop planning and yield management capabilities and it’s companion App is now available in 20 different languages, so that its benefits are being realised by growers across the world.