Step forward with Prophet
Technology relevant to the fresh produce industry has been harnessed with varying success to improve food traceability and safety, identify supplier poor performance, increase revenue, and meet retailer and consumer expectations. The fresh supply chain is highly complex and fragmented – each actor in that chain deciding for themselves (with whatever market intelligence can be gathered and based on its own judgment of what people want) what to grow and when. Budgeting and forecasting based on uncertain demand and supply is immensely difficult.
Lessons learned from technology
Technology has delivered incremental gains to the fresh produce industry over the last few decades. There have been promises of revolutions, but the reality has been that technology has delivered regular evolution and improvements of business processes. The benefits of increased automation have not been fully realised across the supply chain and considerable opportunities still exist to improve processes, mitigate risks, and protect margins. Whenever there has been a need for more than just a commercial relationship (shared cross supply chain coordination) – progress has normally been slow. Benefits are more likely to be realised by those companies that work through the details of processes on a day-to-day basis inside and take an evolutionary approach to delivering those benefits when applying new technology.
Technology next steps – a spotlight on automation and smart software
The challenges of fresh produce and the need to manage its passage through a complex supply chain has encouraged the food industry to embrace the opportunities of technology. The primary task is in knowing precisely what is happening and what the cost value and sale value is, as soon as possible, and as accurately as possible. There is a strong need for granular, pallet by pallet, consignment by consignment, inventory control for all aspects of data processing and reporting.
Automation removes the need for humans to decide which buttons to push and when. Automation can drive significant change in the fresh produce industry by:
- Reducing the time required by human operators to process data through the use of smart algorithm software.
- Delivering improved data exchange technology in order to support human processing of tasks or replace the need for humans to interact with the equipment or rekey data between systems.
Eliminating tasks through automation requires:
Software that can do what the human interaction does.
An ability to automate a complex series of processes and tasks.
An ability to search and collect the right data, to calculate and return the correct result/action on the database for that task to be completed.
Prophet supports fresh produce companies to embrace the following changes:
Deep implementation
It is important to get all of the tasks and data and rules in a system in digital form as a deep implementation. Automation is then a layered evolution of removing the need for humans to decide when and what button to push.
Integration
Integrate openly with other systems (inside and outside the enterprise) so that no rekeying is required, and data availability is maximised. For any software solution to deliver the right scope of automation, it has to have an open approach to integration and to sharing of data.
Experimentation
Experiment across a great many opportunities to work out (sometimes by trial and error) what works. There needs to be a close and long-standing relationship between a technology provider and a fresh produce organisation. Strong, ongoing collaboration is required in order to correctly identify problems and achieve incremental improvements over time.
Prophet works closely with its customers to iterate the software design based on customers’ feedback and the knowledge of their commercial needs. This is another key foundation for deep implementations – allowing adaptations to evolve with the next set of technologies and disruption. Prophet’s software environment is a highly configurable toolkit that allows users to build, adapt, and iterate their system and processes. The flexibilities of the Prophet approach allows its users to incrementally improve supply chain efficiency and discover the remaining 50% of automation opportunities not being captured.
