Why Plantations Need Agriculture Business Data
On 1 July, the government launched the National Fourth Industrial Revolution Policy (4IR) highlighting the importance of technology across 10 industries, including agriculture.
What’s the hype with data and why do agriculture players rely so much on it?
Business data is all the information that relates to the running of a company, such as sales and payrolls. As organisations grow over the years, the amount of stored records naturally grows along with the organisation itself.
Keeping track of useful information
Not all information is useful. However, useful agriculture business data is a great measurement tool, especially for baselines, benchmarks, and goal-setting.
- Baseline consists of initial measurements before applying a solution
- Benchmarks provide a comparison of how other agriculture players in your market and demographics are doing
- Performance goal is a set objective, within a duration of time
Prevent small problems from becoming big challenges
Data allows you to monitor the health of important resources, functions, and processes in your organisation.
Left unattended, small issues can become big challenges, for example:
- An excess of fertilizer usage can result in paying double for resources that are not properly applied
- A water management issue on some blocks of land can affect total harvest of fresh fruit bunches
The right solution to problems
Collecting data helps assess how well your solution is performing, and whether or not your approach needs to be altered or improved in the long run.
Take this scenario for example:
You’ve recognised low productivity among your harvesters, and you decide to apply an automated solution such as Quarto to create an effective and efficient team of plantation workers. With the introduction of this new solution to generate productivity, the resulting outcome is a far more considerable improvement from the baseline.
Plan with predictions, minus the guessing
Planning the future of your business without proper current information involves many unknown variables. While you may have an overall gauge of expenses and output, sometimes the devil is in the details.
Patterns and trends of your plantations and mills from the past till now allows for better strategy. By knowing the present, management can go beyond uneconomical requests such as investment in additional manpower and resources, to being able to present how that can improve the bottom line.
Know your key strengths
High-performing plantations, gangs, mandors (field supervisors), and harvesters can be identified through relevant data. You can now both reward top performers and study these strengths in order to develop strategies that assist and improve lower-performing operating units.
These are some of the highlights why plantations need data, but if you’d like your business to benefit from agriculture business data, drop us a message to chat!
