A Day in the Life of Plantation Workers, with Quarto

Our team of agritech experts at LintraMax designed Quarto to be a platform that makes technology beneficial, practical, and easy-to-use for planters. To showcase how Quarto connects plantation management, let’s go on a small journey that features the life of a field supervisor and plantation manager. They have been working on over 5,000 hectares of land without software and have recently implemented the award-winning Quarto platform to simplify their operations.

The Field Supervisor 

Today, the field supervisor’s duties began at muster call. Once upon a time, over 20 mandors would be conducting roll calls. One-by-one, their attendance would be marked in a logbook at the raise of a hand. With technology, the scene at the muster field is different. There is no shouting of names, just workers lining up in an orderly manner. With a swift scan of the mandor’s smartphone, each face is recognised by Quarto, and the worker’s attendance is captured.  

After this, the supervisor will have a quick chat with his supervisors concerning today’s absenteeism, if any. However, he knows that with Quarto, he is now able to view timely and detailed reports on workers and field operations without being limited to ad-hoc updates, whether verbal or written on a chat. 

As the field supervisor walks through the fields, as usual, he has lost internet connection, but he has nothing to worry about. He will continue his work using the Quarto app, and simply sync the app when he a stable network connection at the estate office. 

He stops for a moment to watch as his gang of harvesters cut down ripe fresh fruit bunches from the trees. These crops will be gathered so that it can be collected by trucks to be transported to mills.  

The supervisor moves on to inspect other field activities including fertiliser application. Unlike conventional methods of manually penning down which block he was at, geotagging would help pinpoint the exact location of his work inspection. Overall, the Quarto app promotes better visibility into field operations, not just for the field supervisors but also for the estate clerks and managers looking at the data captured through the app. 

The Plantation Manager  

For every plantation manager, increasing crop production while controlling costs is a key performance indicator of good plantation management. The manager once had to fully rely on weekly review meetings with the chief estate clerk or assistant to discuss spreadsheets on crop production, procurement, and expenses. With Quarto empowering him with near real-time insights, he is able consistently make more informed decisions whenever an action needed to be taken.   

Today, as he viewed the plantation map on his smartphone, he saw that over 20 blocks of land had uncollected fresh fruit bunches. He immediately alerts the supervisors of these blocks to transport the crops to the mills as soon as possible.  

The shared plantation insights that Quarto provides to stakeholders from various plantation departments such as support services including accounting, marketing and sales, human resource management and research promotes collaboration and teamwork that achieve business goals. 

After achieving digital transformation, the plantation manager realised that he no longer had to give lengthy presentations during regular meetings at the head office. As everyone is now seeing and working on the same updated data, teams were no longer fully reliant on other departments to access the latest business information. 

He was pleasantly surprised that after adopting Quarto, the automation of accounting processes also meant that everything was completed faster with a higher level of security. This even included faster month-end closing for payroll and checkroll, which resulted in higher worker satisfaction.  

As the meeting begun, the plantation manager discussed areas where he saw potential to decrease production costs. He opened Quarto and everyone referred to the latest Plantation Map and Data Analytics screens that would have taken hundreds of hours of manpower to generate manually. They started the discussion, and he was able to answer every critical question with confidence.  

It starts with Quarto  

If you’re part of a plantation team, and you’ve been shuffling through pages of reports at every meeting while wondering how you can access data you need, let’s chat with our LintraMax team and discover how technology can work for your plantation management!