Peake Fruit Saves Thousands with Digital Transformation
Executive summary
Peake Fruit of Colchester has selected Freshware ERP from Affinitus as their modern technology ‘Fresh ERP’ platform to underpin the future growth of the business.
Established in 1982 and a wholly owned subsidiary of Boxford (Suffolk) Farms Limited (est. 1938), Peake Fruit limited is one of the largest Fruit packhouses in East Anglia offering a large range of storage, packing, quality, and marketing services that suit the needs for both UK growers and importers of fresh produce.
With over 4000 tonnes of Controlled Atmosphere storage capacity and state of the art grading and packing equipment, Peake fruit is conveniently located close to Harwich, Felixstowe, Tilbury, and London Gateway ports, just off the A12 and A14.
Boxford Suffolk Farm is the award-winning sister company, producing the finest quality British fruit supplying Supermarket customers via marketing partner Berry Gardens. Established in 1938, the farm adopts some of the latest hi-tech farming techniques and energy saving sustainability initiatives to ensure maximum production with minimum waste.
The family-owned business, founded by Bill and Devora Peake, which also now includes Wallings Nursery, have been producing and packing top quality fruit in East Anglia for the last 60 years.
The Challenge
With business interests covering growing, packing, hotel, spa and golf, the group was not shy of utilising the latest technologies for maximum efficiencies.
Their existing software solution within the growing and packing business, although basic, had served Peake Fruit well, providing essential produce traceability, but it was more of an MRP solution, rather than ERP. It did not have any Quality Control functionality; neither did it support critical BRC compliance requirements.
Furthermore, when the business discovered the solution was soon to be unsupported, they decided to embark on a discovery journey to evaluate the latest industry-specific software solutions available.
Speaking about the evaluation process, Robert Rendall, Director at Peake Fruit says, “The world has moved into intuitive user interfaces and mobile applications, and we were looking for a data-driven solution to take us on a digital transformation journey. We wanted data for AI, forecasting, and compliance and a novel user interface which could really drive our business forward. However, the initial solutions we evaluated felt overpriced and not at all moving with the times. This project was a big undertaking for us, and we needed to make sure it fit for at least the next 10 years.”
We wanted a solution provider who was hungry to innovate and had a willingness to work closely with us to develop the perfect solution. Affinitus’ appetite to innovate and develop their solution really stood them apart from their competitors.
The Freshware Solution
Rendall continues, “We chose Freshware from Affinitus because the solution architecture of the software was more conducive to modern development, and intuitive user interaction. The solution also included several industry specific mobile applications which were developed for Andriod devices, which were very attractive. We shortlisted several other solutions alongside Freshware, including Prophet, Rubicon and LINKFRESH, but we felt these were built on an old-style architecture and less flexible, with iOS or Windows mobile applications.”
“Soft fruit & top fruit production is not like farming of field crops; it’s very manual and labour intensive, there are lots of SKU’s, varieties and crop types to manage and timing is critical. The Freshware solution already had much of the fresh produce functionality we needed, but the team at Affinitus were keen learn more from us and to develop the solution further to meet our requirements. A promise they are delivering upon today.”
The 50+ user Freshware solution manages the entire fruit supply operation from field to dispatch, across three businesses, including growing and harvest recording, farming jobs and field labour, pack house, inventory, traceability, packaging, QC, and logistics. The Freshware solution provides electronic data capture at every stage, to provide the business with full traceability, instant cost analysis, KPI’s and performance reporting.
Fruit growing and supply is a “just in time” operation, and a finely balanced production process. Packing can’t begin too early because the fruit is still being harvested and production will have to stop to allow the harvest to catch up. Nor can it start too late, as the fruit may spoil and not be packed in time to meet the despatch and delivery deadlines.
In the Packhouse
Freshware provides Peak Fruit with critical real-time live data insights into exactly where the required fruit is in the grow-harvest-pack process enabling accurate production planning, maximum packhouse efficiency, on-time deliveries with improved quality – and ultimately, happy customers.
Packhouse operations are managed via touchscreen and tablet applications, tracking the status and progress of each job and each packing line.
Freshware Tablet Application: Pack house job list
Packaging inventory is closely tracked with costs and quantities consumed allocated to each packhouse job.
On the Farm
Out in the orchards and polytunnels Freshware provides planting records of what is growing where, each area tagged with a GPS location for easy identification.
Cropping profiles facilitate a crop/yield forecasting tool which uses Planting Records and templated harvest yield percentages on a week 1-52 per year basis. Different scenarios can be compared or tested by adjusting the current profile, via an override facility, without affecting the original plan. This is further supported by an “Actual” profile, which captures the actual yield over the 1-52 weeks for the specific plot’s planting record. Also included is an Import/Export function of data for the specific picking year.
In addition, fieldsman can also monitor forecasts for the short-term weeks ahead using the daily-weekly cropping profile; ensuring that the required staffing levels and budget are planned and applied.
A suite of cut sheets is provided (Commercial Demand, Fieldsman Demand, Gang Demand, Load Planning) to determine which fruit is to be harvested when. All farming, labour and production costs are captured, and actual crop yields are tracked against the forecast, to show the true cost of production.
Field jobs are allocated and tracked per employee, via a mobile (Andriod) application, providing labour efficiency and performance insights. Time and attendance data can be exported for payroll.
Freshware: Field Picker Performance KPIs
Quality Control
QC has been transformed from 100% paper based to 100% electronic data capture. As Robert Rendall explains, “We had so much data on QC, all in paper-based records, but we never did anything with it. The time and labour to analyse it was too large for the business to spare. Previously data to satisfy BRC compliance audits would have taken hours to collate. The Freshware solution has been designed with traceability and quality requirements built in, so the data is always at hand whenever its needed. In addition, we can link our real time quality data with our production cost data providing a fantastic insight into what things are costing us.”
Freshware Mobile Quality Control Applications are provided on Andriod Tablets to manage four different QC processes:
– Intake QC
– On-line Production QC
– Positive Release QC
– Residency QC (how long in-storage).
Freshware Tablet QC – Goods-in QC Report
Freshware Tablet QC – In-Line QC Report
The Benefits
Although still in the early phases of this project, some benefits to the business are already clear, and these will only increase with time.
Benefits achieved to date from the implementation of the Freshware solution have included:
– Business Transformation via data-driven efficient processes.
– Improved visibility of costs
– Improved visibility of fruit supply
– Electronic data capture – removing manual paper-based processes.
– Improved integration & collaboration across all areas of the business.
– Removal of data duplication and manual data entry processes.
– Efficient deployment of labour and resources.
– Real-time live business data for improved decision making.
– Many manual processes now automated.
– QC converted from paper-based to 100% electronic.
– Combined real time quality and production cost insights to identify where costs are incurred.
– Cost of production insights and labour performance analysis help improve farming and harvest efficiencies.
– Improved customer service and ability to be nimble in response to customer requirements.
– Rapid user adoption – Intuitive user interface
– Favourable Cost of Ownership
– Project team continuity – key presales personnel have continued to be hands-on in the solution deployment team.
As a business, the more operational and performance data we have, the better we can execute planning and forecasting or allocation of labour and resources. We can save thousands of pounds in time, resources, and lost efficiencies due to knowing exactly where our fruit is in the process. Fruit production is complicated and unlike any other fresh produce sector. Affinitus have kept to their commitment to deliver a solution that meets our exact requirements, and that is worth its weight in gold
The Future
Peake Fruit run very high-tech farm operations, collecting data from state-of-the-art irrigation systems and on-site weather stations. In the future they envisage integrating this with Freshware data to aid forecasting and planning. A.I technology could be used to analyse forecast vs actuals and look for patterns and trends.
Peake Fruit are a forward thinking, dynamic operation, and will use innovation and information technology to drive the business forward and provide a real competitive advantage.
