Introduction

Valle y Pampa (https://www.valleypampa.com/es/home.html) is a leading company in exportation of high-value crops in Peru. It specializes in the production of blueberry and pomegranate crops. Valle y Pampa was one of the first blueberry producing and exporting companies in southern Peru. It stands out for its innovative vision, good labor practices, and its concern for sustainability and the environment.

The objective of this case study is to demonstrate how the digitization of information in different activities, including the management of agricultural workers in crop fields, generates a real and tangible benefit for agricultural producers, improving the relationship between these companies and their labor forces.

Problem statement

Delays in critical work activities prevent obtaining information in a timely manner for decision-making: such as registration of personnel entry, registration of harvest progress, quality, irrigation, maintenance, etc., generating higher costs for the company.

The client (Valle y Pampa) used to register the attendance, assignment of activities and track record of the progress of tasks like harvesting and pruning manually, using pencil and paper. This information had to be transcribed into Excel files to generate reports and calculations, which caused errors and delays that prevented accurate and timely decisions from being made. Likewise, it was necessary to hire a larger number of personnel to achieve this task and, on many occasions the information was very out of date.

Traditional pen-and-paper data capture methods are inadequate for optimal farm management for several reasons:

• They do not have geolocation: of the sampling points, which can be audited later. As well as knowing the exact points where the sample is recorded: lot, collection, house, etc.
• Data recorded on pen and paper is neither reliable nor auditable, with many errors and some illegible data.
• Capturing and sharing data quickly and in a timely manner is not possible: delays in capturing and transferring information limit the ability to act in a timely manner.
• You cannot work with the information and it is difficult to make comparative tables.
• They do not have traceability: it is difficult to know which person collected the data, at what time, within what required and other important variables.‍
• They are difficult to register: Capturing data with pencil and paper while walking among the crops is uncomfortable and prone to errors.

Solution

The implementation of SpaceAG's Workers Module, made it possible to optimize the management of critical work activities and reduce production costs. SpaceAG's mobile app replaced pencil and paper, using smartphones, tablets, and infrared barcode readers such as Zebra, to capture worker's activity data. With this implementation, it was possible to reduce non-productive times of the work teams and have reports so that the client can make strategic decisions related to their resource management.

Optimization of personnel transportation management:

Speeds up the entry of personnel into transportation units. It allows to have information on the real occupancy rates of buses and passenger costs to be able to perform evaluations and negotiate with personnel transportation companies.

Reduction of times in the entry of personnel to farms

Increases speed and accuracy in recording worker attendance in farms. Avoid crowds and reduce non-productive times to increase worker efficiency.

Reduction of time and errors in assigning activities or tasks:

Accelerate the assignment of work activities and the grouping of work crews. This allows you to have accurate information on workers assigned by activity, costs per activity and their comparison with budgets and planning.

Reduction of time and errors in monitoring activities:

It allows to record the progress of critical work activities such as harvesting, assigning buckets, boxes or harvest boxes to each harvester to have complete traceability of units or kilos harvested per person.

Detailed and accurate reports to make better decisions:

From the information collected with our mobile application - using cell phones or Zebra infrared code reading devices - reports were prepared such as worker rankings, transportation costs, assignment of activities, lunches, R&D, OSH, Maintenance and others. .

Reliable and effective information capture:

Thanks to the integration of our platform with the Zebra PDA, information gathering can be carried out in complex environments (darkness, bright light and other conditions).

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We made an integration with Zebra so that our mobile application also works on these infrared barcode reading devices. Zebra devices that download our app will have special buttons to expedite specific use cases such as worker registration and quick assignment of harvest baskets. Additionally, worker ranking reports were customized by thresholds of kilos harvested per day and kilos harvested by origin.

Implementation

The implementation included the following activities:

1. Configuration of cartography or field map with the geographical distribution of the different productive units (tables and sectors).
2. Creation of supervisor and evaluator users with different permission levels (administrator, editor, viewer).
3. Creation and updating of the database of agricultural workers hired by the client.
4. Creation of the personnel attendance record form.
5. Creation of the harvest basket allocation form.
6. Creation of evaluators or supervisors with access codes to the SpaceAG application.
7. Assignment of evaluators to created forms.
8. Training evaluators to explain the data capture process and uploading information to the software.
9. Generation of consolidated and detailed maps (by samples) with color-coding according to data relevant to the client.
10. Generation of personalized reports to view harvester rankings, activity indicators, wages and transportation costs.

The registration of worker activities such as entering farms and harvest progress maintained similar processes with the difference of replacing pencil and paper or cell phones to collect information with infrared barcode reading devices such as Zebra. This allowed existing practices to be optimize and ensure that information flows with greater precision and agility.

Training was carried out for the evaluators responsible for capturing information with digital forms.

Field visits were made to collect the requirements from the client and then to verify the correct operation of the software by both user evaluators and supervisors.

Results

• The speed of registering workers or assigning them baskets to harvest improved by 15.15 times.
• The number of people responsible for making this registration was reduced from 9 people to 3 people.
• Time spent to record, organize and present worker information was reduced by 50%.
• Precise information was obtained about the performance of workers, which allowed optimizing the hiring and departure of personnel.
• The work environment improved since workers no longer suffer from delays in registration. This allows them to perform more tasks or harvest more kilos per day.

The Workers Module helped the client to:

• Reduce non-productive times: This client hires up to 5,000 workers during peak harvest. Reducing the time to register each person by 70% has a high economic impact on the company's labor costs, which represent the majority of production costs.
• Have accurate and timely reports on worker performance: Accessing reports such as bus occupancy, daily attendance, harvester ranking and other Human Resources indicators allowed the client to make better hiring decisions, increase their income and reduce costs.

ROI Analysis

• With cell phones: Little light at 5am at the personnel register, for a sample of 32 people, generated an 8-minute delay in assigning harvest baskets.
• With PDA the allocation of harvest baskets for these 32 people took 1 minute 37 seconds.
• A saving of 13 seconds per person was achieved. However, in complicated conditions this saving can be up to 20 seconds per person.
• This client registers 3,000 people at peak harvest. Thanks to the worker module integrated with Zebra, 20 seconds per person are saved in assigning harvest baskets. This results in a total of 60,000 seconds saved per day which is equivalent to 16.65 hours or 2 days saved per day.
• The same savings in harvest basket allocation are repeated for attendance registration, activity allocation, and dismissal registration. The savings are repeated 3 times for a total of 8 wages per day.
• If we consider that the daily wage - including workloads - costs US$ 20 per day. Thanks to the use of PDAs for check-in and check-out, harvest basket assignment, and activity assignment, the client was able to save US$160 per day or US$4,800 per month.
• In addition to the savings in the registration of people with PDAs, the speed of the registrations allowed us to reduce from 9 people responsible for making the registrations to 3 people. Resulting in a saving of 6 wages per day was achieved, which corresponds to US$ 120 per day or US$ 3,600 per month.
• Finally, thanks to the implementation of SpaceAG software that allows the automatic generation of reports and tables, the time of data entry personnel was reduced by 50%. The client hires 8 digitizers per day. The saving is 4 wages per day, which corresponds to US$ 80 per day or US$ 2,400 per month.
• Adding the savings in personnel registration using PDAs, the savings in the wages responsible for the records and the savings in the time of the data entry operators, the total savings that Valle y Pampa achieved per month was US$10,800.

Additionally:

• Our module helps to organize the information in order to know who are the best and worst workers. In this way, it allows work groups to be better organized.
• It improves the work environment, because it avoids delays that inconvenience staff and take away their time from carrying out field activities that influence their salaries, such as harvesting.
• It allows data entry clerks to better organize their work time to prepare reports that make it easier to make better decisions.
• Helps establish better KPIs in processes. For example, it allows greater visibility of errors in critical activities such as pruning so that people who are not doing their jobs can be corrected or trained.

Costs associated with the implementation of the Worker Module:

‍Implementation cost + monthly license cost

Considering that this module has an average price of US$ 1,250 per month per company and that it allows you to obtain income of up to US$ 10,800 per month, then the return on investment is 8.64 times or 864%.

Future plans

In addition to the digitalization of worker management to measure performance and control work activities, the next step will be the implementation of the Workers Portal. This portal will carry the brand and logo of the client, it will serve to give harvesters access to the recorded figures of their daily harvest. By sharing this information prior to the weekly payment, any claim or observation can be addressed with due anticipation. This will achieve greater transparency and improve communication between the client and their harvesters or temporary workers. Subsequently, this portal will be used to share communications and valuable content with workers, as well as other services such as access to work, financing, educational content and other valuable content.

The module collects critical data on the activities carried out by workers, such as kilos harvested per person. This information is used to rate the performance of workers and to calculate payroll. Additionally, this module collects information on days worked per person, absenteeism rates and other relevant information to generate a general rating of workers that allows them to be offered other services such as personal loans.

Likewise, information on the performance of workers - segmented by crop, variety, phenological stage and similar - can be cross-referenced with demographic information such as origin, gender, age, etc. This will allow work groups to be better assigned with people who are better aligned with certain activities and crop conditions.

Other agricultural technology or practice that could be integrated with the Worker Module in the future:

Integration to other brands of infrared barcode reading devices, as well as integration with accounting information systems or ERPs.

Conclusions

• Valle y Pampa is a leading agro-export company in Peru that stands out for its innovative and sustainable approach. In this case, the main problem to be solved was the manual management of their work activities, which generated delays and errors in records, preventing accurate and timely decisions from being made.
• The solution was the implementation of SpaceAG's Workers Module, which digitalized management and reduced production costs. A mobile app was used to capture data on critical work activities such as farm entry and harvest registration on mobile devices and Zebra brand infrared barcode readers.
• The key benefits of the module were the optimization of personnel transportation, the reduction of time entering fields, the more agile assignment of activities, the precise monitoring of activities and the generation of detailed reports to make strategic decisions.
• The implementation included system configuration, evaluator training, and report customization. The results showed a significant improvement in registration speed, a reduction in the number of personnel required and better decision making based on accurate information.

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