Buying time for meat buyers

Time is money in business, which is why more companies are investing in mobile applications that allow them to free up more of the former.

For meat company Affco, whose 55 agents roam the country looking for livestock to send to its slaughterhouses, getting detailed information back to headquarters before the cattle trucks set off is essential.

"Time is of the essence," said Affco finance manager Robert Gerrie.

"We need to get the information quickly so we can do some production planning and advise our plants when stock is going to arrive."

Traditionally, Affco's agents would write up purchase orders on forms while still on the farm, faxing them to the office later.

The company had installed imaging software that scanned incoming faxes for information and automatically transferred it to electronic forms, but that proved less than satisfactory.

"Sometimes we were getting up to 30 per cent error rate [in the electronic forms]. We had to go through each document and manually change them," said Gerrie.

Instead, the livestock buyers were equipped with iPAQ handheld computers, fitted with GTran wireless cards capable of connecting to Telecom's CDMA network.

Affco wrote client software for the devices, which carry calculation tables and the details of all the farms the company deals with.

From their cars, the agents send completed electronic forms over the mobile network back to the office, where they enter a local area and are fed into a SQL Server database.

Affco signed a three-year deal with Telecom but was not impressed with its flagship handheld offering, the Audiovox Thera.

Ideally, it wanted to equip agents with the Qtek 1010, which Vodafone sells. In the end, Telecom was able to offer a better deal overall, so the iPAQ/GTran combination won.

Despite TelstraClear and Vodafone talking up their 3G plans, Gerrie said there appeared to be little benefit for Affco in a higher-capacity, higher-speed network.

"Speed is not a huge issue and we're not sending huge amounts of data."


How to enter:


Mobile application developers are invited to enter the Frontier transtasman competition being run by the Herald and Ericsson.

The competition aims to find the best mobile applications in New Zealand and Australia.

See www.ericsson.co.nz/developers/frontier