KEY POINTS:
Never mind what the label on the food you are about to eat says about recommended daily intake. It can reveal much more than that - like whose hand moved it from which shelf, at which hour, on which day last month.
Exporters need to be able to click their fingers and bring up this highly detailed information if they want to enter foreign markets.
In the past, systems to keep track of this sort of information tended to be the preserve of relatively large organisations.
At Walker Datavision on Auckland's North Shore, a team of designers are producing a more compact system for tracing products. Called Label & Track, it involves a barcode, scanners and a computer program. The scanners record the movements of goods - when they were moved, which pallet they come from, who handled them - and this information is stored in the barcode and computer database.
The system comes at a price that smaller businesses are able to afford.
And thanks to a lucky break with a foreign investor, the inventors from Mairangi Bay are going global. Starting with Britain and Australia, Label & Track is on the way to being available in 24 countries by the end of next year.
Walker Datavision has produced barcode systems for New Zealand's dairy industry for the past decade, custom building the software for each business.
Realising that many aspects of the software could be applied more widely, the designers set out to develop Label & Track, which is 80 per cent standardised and 20 per cent customised, and which the company says comes at a fraction of the price of systems of the same capacity.
Like the more expensive versions, the new software allows companies to track their products from the supermarket shelf in Korea back to dispatch in a South Auckland factory.
It's a system that can be scaled up or down depending on the company's size and motivation, and scanners can be used by everyone from the top dog to the floor person.
"It's Kiwi ingenuity," says managing director Paul Ryan.
The product was just what Japanese labelling giant Sato was looking for.
Having branched into Oceania at the start of 2006, Sato snapped up the opportunity to buy Label & Track, and injected the necessary $1 million to push the software on to the market.
Ryan says the company was lucky to be singled out by a leading global company.
He drove Walker Datavision in the 1990s before setting up internet company Woosh, then selling New Zealand health software to international markets.
Ryan returned to take up the reins of Walker Datavision in August last year.
A foreign bid was just what Ryan was looking for. "This is an example of foreign direct investment working," he says.
Sato has been around since 1940 and is included on the Japanese Nikkei index.
It is a world leader in a range of data communication systems and labelling products including radio frequency identification, barcode printers, label design software, handheld terminals, mobile computers and wireless infrastructure.
Ryan and his team now report to the Singapore office, but Sato decided to keep the Label & Track design and manufacturing in Auckland.
"It would have been cheaper to take it out of New Zealand but all the Kiwi ingenuity was here and that weighted their decision to keep it here," Ryan says.
That suits the values of the Kiwi company it proudly flies a Buy NZ Made flag outside.
Walker Datavision had a vision to help fellow New Zealand businesses project their products overseas and says it is proud to be behind Kiwi success stories such as Westland Milk Products.
"Companies in New Zealand can be producing fantastic products but there are barriers to entry. Irrespective of size they can use Label & Track. It's Fonterra capability but it's affordable," Ryan says.
Like its clients, Walker Datavision knows the challenges of developing an international brand from Downunder, he says.
"For every New Zealand software company, there is the challenge of having ideas and ingenuity but not being able to get it out there."
He says the company has maintained its position in the market by adapting to changes, and seizing new opportunities.
Walker Datavision was founded as a textiles company and had a patent to produce the plastic tags used to attach labels to clothing.
In the 1980s, it realised the world was going barcode and followed suit. And when radio frequency identification came about in the 1990s, the company pioneered it in New Zealand.
Using the labelling side of the business to build up clients, Walker Datavision also began producing traceability software when it found exporters needed to provide more information than was available.
The company now dominates the dairy industry and is moving into wine and other exporters who require a high level of traceability of their products.
Ryan decided the company had to cut its losses when the computer language used to develop software changed from using .Net to Microsoft Workflow.
The entire development team had to be retrained in the new "spaghetti code", a move which set development back almost four years, but prepared the company for the future.
"The product is taking up well because there is no risk, we have been through the pain, already built it, we've had the unexpected happen to us," he says.
Ground staff are just as passionate about Label & Track as the managers; some have been working on it since 1990.
"These people have such a large and long amount of experience, and that's reflective of where we see the product going," Ryan says.
The company now has 100 staff, a satellite office in Christchurch and sales reps around the country.
Its future will involve moving into radio frequency identification tags, which can carry more data than barcodes and are hidden on the back of the label, and ensuring designers remain a few steps ahead of market developments.
"We've just had a great success and are going at a hundred miles an hour," Ryan says.
