The world’s population continues to grow at a steady pace with the world population predicted to top 10 billion people by 2050.

Food production will need to keep pace in a sustainable way as the amount of arable land continues to shrink and water demand increases.

This implies a need for increased farming efficiency and improvements to the food supply chain including transparency, safety, and efficiency.

As part of Adroit’s farm-to-table Food Chain focus, we work with Agribusiness to:

• Manage and improve workforce engagement with our best in class HR solutions
• Apply TQM techniques and leverage Digital Assets and Internet of Things to gain insights to improve farm management processes
• Manage Farming Equipment and Maintenance with our best in class fleet maintenance solutions
• Improve food safety and regulatory compliance
• Define a future state for Agribusiness workstreams and to select and implement ERP class solutions.

Workforce Management Solutions

The management of the agribusiness labor force faces several challenges including changing age demographics, high seasonality, increasing needs for technical skills, and recruitment.  Adroit’s HCM experts can assist with defining Business Performance Improvements with a focus on:

• Recruitment
• Workforce Management
• Time and Attendance
• Payroll
• Self Service Applications

With best in class business processes and practices defined we can assess your current HCM system. We often find that our clients have good solutions that simply need to be reimplemented or tweaked. If your software doesn’t support your desired future state we can help you to select and implement the software solution that best fits your needs.

Leverage Internet of Things for TQM Driven Performance Improvements

There has been phenomenal progress with the innovation of internet enabled technologies to support agribusiness. The question for individual farms and agribusiness is how to best leverage these innovations?  Adroit is rooted in the application of Total Quality Management principles. To improve something you must be able to understand it. To understand something need to be able to measure it.  Internet enabled devices and equipment enable the real time capture of data from the field that when blended with other feeds (such as satellite data) and intelligence can be transformed into actionable information.

Potential examples for IOT enabled use cases include:

• Precise weather monitoring services and sensors
• Soil condition monitoring
• Silo and Tank Levels
• Pest Detection
• Equipment tracking and diagnostics

In isolation individual data fields yield little information. It is when collated into intelligent systems that the real value can be realized to drive a TQM style continuous improvement program. Adroit can help you to develop such a program, identify and select the best sensors and intelligence systems, integrate the information into your Agribusiness ERP and to establish the continuous improvement frameworks.

Farming Equipment Fleet Management

Our Ramco – Fleet Management solution supports end-to-end on-farm fleet management aiming to increase the availability of your equipment and to reduce your total cost of operations.  The solution provides complete asset visibility, tracks the asset condition, plans maintenance activities, and carries out essential repairs. Use the solution to create and manage your maintenance budget and the full life cycle of your equipment.

Key functionality includes:

• Asset Bill of Materials
• Skill sets and certification for maintenance crews
• Maintenance plans
• Asset availability management
• Execute maintenance, repair and overhaul activities
• Review repair and maintenance history
• Operator compliances and management
• Unified asset induction – automatically recorded to both operational and financial systems
• Cost effective asset retirement – Asset retirement recommendations are based on comprehensive parameters, encompassing usage history, present condition and so on, to ensure maximum utilization
• Optimized Resource Allocation – Capability to provide fleet allocation recommendations based on a variety of factors such as maintenance schedules, cargo compatibility and so on, for optimized trip-vehicle matching

Farming Food Safety and Regulatory Compliance

Adroit is a Food Safety training organization that assists agribusinesses to establish food safety programs to ensure compliance to laws and regulations and to obtain and retain desired food safety certification schemes.  We can review your Good Agricultural Practices to reduce microbial contamination to ensure that the food you sell will not cause harm or illness for consumers. Crops that are particularly vulnerable include lettuces, sprouts, cantaloupes, green onions, carrots, and raspberries. 

Our Food Safety Experts can provide an initial audit readiness review focused upon:

• General farm review including worker health and hygiene, traceability, water quality, manure and compost, animals and livestock)
• Field harvesting and packing activities
• Packing house facility
• Storage and transportation
• Food defense procedures

Program Development

Adroit’s food safety programs take into account the various areas of the food safety schemes and typical customer requirements to provide a nice breakdown of the areas that require formalized processes, procedures, and systematic record keeping.  We are a strong advocate for the integration of business procedures and systems and food safety procedures and systems.  We design a food safety program in which electronic records, electronic signatures, and procedures are facilitated by the agribusiness / ERP system.

Our focus is not to just achieve the bare minimum of compliance but to establish a responsive and systematic framework that will scale with the business and provide real time metrics that provide compliance assurance.  Food safety compliance is no longer just a “quality” team problem. It is a business problem.

Together we will develop detailed policies and procedures, utilizing system automation and electronic signature capture where possible, that when implemented will position you to pass and remain in compliance of FSMA and GFSI and pass your food safety scheme audit.

Training and Implementation

Adroit provides both on farm and remote training programs. The training can be part of a full food safety program or targeted to problematic areas that are part of a non-compliance concern. We provide, review, and demonstrate specific procedures with your teams.  We help to identify champions for the procedures and certify them to train company employees, contractors, etc.  We create a training matrix based on level, role, and food risk and develop training curriculum and procedures by role.  We stand shoulder to shoulder with you to ensure the training and any changes are implemented and that continuous feedback and metrics are in place to ensure ongoing compliance.

Audit and Inspection Preparation

Anticipating an upcoming audit can be stressful.  We can walk through your policies, procedures, records, and exception management help you to understand where you may have potential deviations. We then help to correct those deficiencies to give you the confidence that you will perform well for the audit or inspection.

Agribusiness Process Improvement and Farm Management Software Selection

Adroit believes that to drive meaningful performance improvement within an Agribusiness it is important to focus on optimizing groups of processes known as workstreams.  We view the typical workstreams of an Agribusiness as:

• Procure to Pay: This includes sourcing, purchasing, receiving, and payment of seed, supplies, equipment, etc.
• Plan to Harvest: This includes all the activities and processes that support field planning and crop selection, soil preparation, seed selection, irrigation, crop growth, fertilizing, and harvesting
• Inventory Management: This includes tracking and managing all inventory in warehouses, storage, silos, etc.
• Field Management: A farm is comprised of a set of fields. Farm management organizes specific seed lots into crop productions and then directs and captures all of the day to day tasks associated with a specific crop production.
• Livestock Management: Livestock management organizes specific livestock into herds and then directs and captures all of the day to day tasks associated with the full life cycle of the herd.
• Order to Cash: This includes capturing initial contracts and orders for the harvested food, shipping the food, and receipt of payment. The orientation of the farm in the food chain dictates the order to cash processes necessary. Key scenarios include:
  • Farms are owned by corporations the supporting business units that acquire the goods.
  • Corporate contracts
  • Cooperatives
  • Direct Sale to Grocers and Public
  • Federal Programs
• Hire to Retire: This includes the management of all activities associated with recruiting, managing, paying, and benefits of permanent and temporary workforces.
• Manage the Agribusiness: This includes high-level planning, budgeting, financial management, and strategic processes associated.

With the workstreams current and future states defined Adroit can do an assessment of your existing agribusiness and farm management software.  Where there is a fit we can help you to improve your processes or we can help you to evaluate and select a new system.D