Rheeders Boerdery is situated just outside Brits in North West, South Africa. Rheeders Boerdery harvests 14 different products with production throughout the calendar year, supplying major food retailers across South Africa. With 300-500 permanent and piecework employees, monitoring the productivity of the workforce is paramount to the success of the farm.

The Challenge

Various factors have led to an increasingly competitive agricultural environment including increased wage costs, economic downturn and a demand for higher quality produce from consumers. This requires farmers to analyse all areas of their supply chain for inefficiencies in order to guarantee future profits with continually decreasing profit margins.

Many farmers are unsure how to be more productive or how productivity influences their supply chain as it was not measured in the past. From the minute Rheeders Boerdery started monitoring their supply chain with the use of Agrigistics key insights followed. “This was just the first step, measuring and identifying inefficiencies. Once everything is measured throughout the farming process, we will start analysing all areas and opportunities for the future,” said Derick Rheeders, manager of Rheeders Boerdery.

Why use Agrigistics?

Rheeders Boerdery identified a few critical opportunity losses with the help of Agrigistics. One of these losses being where harvester employees usually clocked in at the packhouse and thereafter they were transported to their assigned harvesting blocks. At the end of a working day the same harvester employees only clocked out once they arrived back at the packhouse. The harvester employees were only productive for 90% of the available time.

With Agrigistics it is possible to clock in and out on different harvesting blocks as well as different activities. Once the employees started clocking on the harvest blocks, the production time increased by 10% which results in 7000 extra man hours per month for Rheeders Boerdery.

Agrigistics solves problems

“Once you have started measuring a process, you can quantify standards for those processes. This helps you to identify future opportunities and losses you were never aware of ” concluded Derick Rheeders.

Agrigistics is the perfect tool to allow you as a farmer to identify key areas in your business where you can improve on. All the information is available instantly at your fingertips. All you need to do is react, adapt and improve.