Our studio is located within a community that is largely comprised of rich rural farmland. Chatham-Kent is known as one of the biggest agricultural suppliers in the world and as such is home to many ag-related companies. To those not familiar with the agriculture sector, it may come as a surprise to find out that farms quite often utilize cutting edge technology to help with production and management. From the heavy equipment that is used to farmers on their iPhones and Blackberries in the field, technology use is widespread.

One such company that has decided to utilize this innovative technology is Greenhill Produce. Greenhill is a producer of bell peppers that over the years has expanded operations over a few facility locations. Operating multiple locations can introduce several logistical challenges and the production tracking system they were using was no longer able to meet their needs.

The Greenhill Production Application

At the beginning of 2012, Greenhill approached Logix to see what we could do to help improve and streamline their production system. They had several main needs that were identified:

• A way for management and staff to submit and view production receipts.
• The ability to view instant reports for weekly, monthly and yearly production.
• Access to instant yield reports.
• Flexibility to manage their locations and add new locations in the future.
• Pepper variety and colour management.
• Customer management.
• Access to data and reports from previous years.
• PDF and email generation of receipts.
• Search and sort functionality.

All of these features also needed to be accessible online if the client was off-site. Because of this need it was determined that a web application was the best route. A server was placed on-site at Greenhill’s main office to securely host the web application. Security was put in place to protect the data and user authentication was added for an extra level of protection.

Data from previous years was imported into the new application and it was fully rolled out in May of 2012.

The Purchase Order Application

Shortly following the success of the Production application, Greenhill approached us again. They were very happy with how the production system was working and now wanted to streamline the management of their internal purchase orders for projects. The project needed:

• Online access similar to the Product application.
• The ability to manage Vendors that they purchase from.
• Project and Location details.
• Multi-item purchase order entry.
• Generation of purchase order as a PDF and email.
• Staff user authentication.
• Searchable entries.

During the development of the Production application, the Logix team had been looking into a variety of potential frameworks that would provide a solid base for future projects. We came across a PHP framework called Laravel which we were able to transition into relatively quickly. The framework provided a very solid, secure and stable starting point that would easily allow for projects to be extended in the future. Because of it’s flexibility, we decided that we would use Laravel as the framework behind the new Purchase Order application. It allowed us to add features into the application that would have normally taken 2-3 times more time to build from scratch. As our first application built with Laravel, we were incredibly impressed and have decided to continue using it as our framework of choice for future projects.

When the app was finalized it was launched on the same server that ran the production application. It allowed Greenhill to fill out complete purchase order details and track purchases by vendor, location and project. Total yearly expenses for a project as well as yearly purchases by vendor could be viewed with a simple search function.

There was one additional component to this project that we enjoyed working on the most and the client was very pleased with, and that was a mobile app.

There’s An App For That

Being able to add purchase orders was great, but sometimes the client needed to enter information while away from their computer. The iPhone was identified as the best tool to achieve this so planning of an iPhone app was underway. The app mirrors the functionality almost exactly except that the interface is customized specifically for the iPhone to allow for quick and easy data entry and viewing.

The main interface consists of four sections: Purchase Orders, Projects, Vendors and Location. Each section allows the user to view and edit existing entries as well as add new ones. The purchase order form allows detailed entry of multiple items similar to the full web application. While it’s main purpose was to allow quick entry of POs, it also provides an easy interface to view previous orders.

Greenhill made the decision to purchase new iPhone 5s and the app was rolled out internally. It was a great complimentary piece to the full web application.

A Suite of Applications

The final outcome from these projects was a full suite of applications that helped Greenhill Produce better track their production and operational expenses.