ADAK Software Announces the Debut of Its Sales Order Entry Module for Farm Production Manager

ALBANY, N.Y., February 22, 2019 (Newswire.com) - ADAK Software, a provider of world-class crop scheduling software to market farmers focused on growing vegetables and flowers, is excited to announce the release of its Sales Order Entry (SOE) module. The Sales Order Entry feature is fully integrated with the highly successful farm produce scheduling functionality provided by ADAK’s Farm Production Manager system released in 2018. 

SOE is not to be confused with e-commerce marketplace solutions which manage the endpoint transaction of the farmer’s selling process. SOE provides visibility to those growers who need to better manage long-range production plans and short-term priorities through the growing period of the farm-to-market supply chain journey.

The new Sales Order Entry feature helps to prevent serious mistakes such as starting with the wrong product mix or planting at the wrong time in the season. These errors can mean growing capacity is committed and money and other resources have been spent, resulting in difficult-to-recover-from losses. 

“As part of market farm operations, Farm Production Manager’s Sales Order Entry can significantly improve finished goods inventory planning," stated Chris Trow, CEO of ADAK Software. "We have been planning this feature for some time based on requests from our customers and they are excited to begin using this key feature.”

Long-Range Capacity Planning

The SOE feature considers how long products need to grow, from the seeding event to harvest, which is stored in the systems as the growing lead time. When planning growing schedules, the SOE module calculates the appropriate planning horizon and how it should extend into the future as far as total growing lead time. By simulating beyond product lead times, SOE can identify issues with resources that limit capacity and may take more time or money to fix. 

Consequently, SOE can now be used to consider long-range production forecasts as part of the market farmers’ planning process. This technique, referred to as a "what-if" simulation, within the enhanced system is complemented by known sales orders that are fully committed. The SOE Production Forecasts can incorporate placeholders for the sales orders the market farmer hopes to obtain as crop production goes on across the growing season.

The new SOE feature’s long-range planning capabilities provide a more realistic foundation for estimating requirements for dependent resources such as growing trays, plastic sheeting requirements and production amendments. In addition, strategies for managing capacity constraints in growing areas such as greenhouses, fields, washing areas, manpower, cash and even trucking availability are improved using SOE management.

Short-Range Priority Planning

Inside the horizon of total lead time, when seeds are in the soil and the forces of nature are at work, it’s good to have a tool like SOE to provide guidance as planning is critical to the success of the market farmer. When SOE is used for long-range planning purposes, risk is reduced and the variation between poor planning and what can be achieved with SOE flexibility produces positive results to the greatest extent possible.

Under short-range planning, the SOE will contain primarily hard sales orders and include little in terms of production forecasts. The unsold crop production inventory included as part of the active schedule become the Available To Promise production capacity with the hard sales orders becoming the firm commitments. Inside of the growing lead time, the SOE Priority Planning is the remaining lever available to manage the resources which still have flexibility and maximize delivery success. 

The SOE provides the delivery details needed to focus workforce efforts  

The Inventory Plan for arugula screenshot shows expected harvest quantities and dates as growing schedules, integrated with SOE shipping dates and quantities, sorted in ascending date order.

Brian Zweig of Business Opportunities Management Consulting, who provides business consulting assistance to growers in the Hudson Valley, noted that SOE can solve many critical challenges for the business-minded farmer. “Producing vegetables can be a very complicated operation in today’s agricultural economy,” stated Zweig. “Growers are managing multiple crops and may have a variety of distribution channels that need to be satisfied, including farmers markets, CSA customers, restaurants and wholesale customers. SOE provides functionality that gives growers better control of their operation, so that they can make sure customer demand for fresh produce is satisfied, thereby maximizing the farmer’s profits.”

About Business Opportunities Management Consulting

Business Opportunities Management Consulting (Defreestville, New York) was founded in 1998 by Brian Zweig. Since its inception, the firm has been helping businesses in the following areas:

• Development and implementation of business plans
• Securing of funding for expansion and start-ups
• Development of new products and markets, including international distribution

About ADAK Software LLC

ADAK Software has been developing scheduling software and working with farms to schedule their crops and keep records since 1996. ADAK has aggressively adopted and incorporated new technology into its products with Farm Production Manager available as a completely cloud-based application. We have an industrial strength back-end using Microsoft Azure SQL Server and the best user interface technology available. Farm Production Manager’s user interface is highly customizable by the user and data interactions with the cloud are blazingly fast and responsive. ADAK also offers mobile apps to extend the utility of our product to areas where internet connectivity does not exist.

Source: ADAK Software