After months of work behind the scenes I’m excited to finally share news about Farm Check, Procurant’s new product for agricultural operations in the food industry. We’re launching Farm Check this week to address the significant benefits that come from replacing paper operations logs with an electronic system that runs on almost any mobile device, including Android and Apple cell phones and tablets.
If you think about all the places around a farming operation where supervisors have to collect information on a clipboard, and the fat white ring binder where that information ends up, never to be seen again – and I know there are many, I’ve been in your offices and seen the shelves full of binders – then all of those tasks represent opportunities to use an electronic question-and-answer based system.
So how exactly can this new application be used? Let me share a few ideas.
Checklists can be created for anything you do on a regular basis. We’ve pre-built more than 20 checklists in multiple languages ready to use out-of-the-box. These checklists were built with guidance from your peers, and they include tasks associated with pre-harvest checklists, daily operations logs, crew management, cleanliness logs for equipment, facilities and people, check-in logs, receiving and more. Building additional checklists or modifying the pre-built lists is easy and can be done by your team or ours.
For each item on a checklist you can add details about what to do if a check fails; this may be to alert a supervisor, send a text or email or repeat the task. You can add photographs or video to any task, and you can make this mandatory such as if you see evidence of animal intrusion in a field. You can add policy guidelines to each step in case operators need guidance on a process step.
Having the data in a database rather than on a piece of paper provides a number of benefits. First, the data can be recalled at any time. Maybe it’s needed for an audit months later. With a few clicks you can run a report and display all the required details. Speaking of reporting, the data is easily available for comparison and trending. Are you getting better? Are checks being done regularly? Are you meeting critical business targets?
Next, Farm Check provides a permanent record, not one that might get erased or dropped in the mud, blown away in the wind or slip down between the seats in the supervisor’s truck. If you are so inclined you can even save your records to a blockchain for the highest level of authenticity!
Third, Farm Check is verifiable. The data is stamped with a date and time, and the user has to sign in, so you know exactly when checks are being performed and by whom. Another option is to add GPS data so you can connect a physical location to the information. Of course nobody in your organization fills out paper checklists on the couch while watching TV at night, but I’m not so sure about those other guys.
We think there are many areas of agricultural operations where Farm Check can be used. Once you see it you will probably think of many more.
