AGRICULTURAL NEWS - Claims made by customers regarding the quality of produce erodes the value that gets paid back to the grower in the fresh produce marketing industry.

 

For Tru-Cape Fruit marketing, reducing claims is as important as delivery only the correct fruit. Because of Tru-Cape's size, the volume of claims can amount to millions of Rands which is why managing director Roelf Pienaar, tasked his team to find a way to manage and if possible reduce them.

 

While analysing the business and its processes they discovered holes that needed to be plugged.

 

“In the end, we understand that claims are part of the business, but it is in our as well as the customer’s interest to minimise claims and waste,” says Pienaar but adds that the business also needed better intelligence to improve planning and to provide accurate feedback to growers and packhouses.

 

“We decided that we needed a technology solution in the form of an application that customers can use as well as a desktop dashboard that will track claims in real time and provide us with meaningful reporting to better make planning and packing decisions,” he says.

Tru-Cape’s quality assurance manager, Henk Griessel, explains that with a natural and perishable product some degradation is expected but the Pomona’s Eyes app, named after the Greek goddess of orchard fruit, helps Tru-Cape prevent excessive claims and take human guesswork out of determining if and how a claim should be met.

Automating business, developing the Pomona’s Eyes app

“We approached Nick van der Vreken who had created a successful fuel station management application for our shareholder Two-a-Day.

“Although I have a full-time position as National IT Manager for WastePlan, I take on development projects in my own time so was pleased to receive an enquiry from Tru-Cape”, says Van der Vreken.

 

“As I specialise in analysing structures and automating business, developing the Pomona’s Eyes app was a good fit for my skills set. The mobile application has been built on top of the Cordova framework, and the desktop application is based on the node.js framework.

 

These frameworks allow for fast development and a real-time cloud integration with Tru-Cape’s SysPro system.”

Aside from wanting to reduce the quantum of claims, the company also wanted the technology to enable greater productivity which I think we well achieved,” Van der Vreken explains.