Southland Farm Services Case Study
Software Upgrade Helps Dairy Services Company Cut Paperwork and Streamline Reporting
Dairy services company Southland Farm Services recently began a major upgrade of its Nimbus system. The goal, says Lou Dougherty, the company’s Office Manager, is to reduce paperwork, and reduce human error as much as possible so that all employees are working with the most accurate information.
The company, based in Invercargill, is a one stop provider of dairy, plumbing, and mechanical and civil services for dairy farmers within the Southland Region. Its operations include dairy products and services, as well as maintenance of dairy sheds and robotic sheds. The company also offers domestic, commercial, and industrial plumbing services and a civil construction business which provides everything from roading to water and effluent systems.
While Southland Farm Services has used Nimbus for more than a decade, this is its first major system upgrade. The upgrade has led to a detailed overhaul of the system and requires changes to operating processes, which means that it’s going both slowly and steadily.
“We want to use Nimbus more throughout our operations and get more of our work digital. There’s a lot of processes we can do offsite within Nimbus using laptops. We want to centralise a lot of paperwork in a single package.”
For example, there’s the field staff who finish onsite work and find they have extra work in the form of paperwork to be filled out and submitted. “If that’s 30 minutes of paperwork at the end of the day when you could be doing it as you go, then using Nimbus is much easier.”
The first phase of its Nimbus upgrade has also meant immediate improvements with the stock system. Southland Farm Services now has all its stock barcoded, and all stock is scanned in and out. “We’ve eliminated handwriting our dockets and manually keying them into the system so that we can invoice our customers. We believe with the barcoding and scanning our stock figures are going to be more accurate.”
Recently, Southland Farm Services purchased the Dashboards feature to add data visualization to the software’s reporting capabilities and saves time at month end when manager’s request updated information.
Dashboards helps make reporting to managers more efficient, allowing Dougherty to export key monthly figures to the company Directors, and when she showed it to the Operations Manager, he absolutely loved it.
Although Dougherty sees room for some adjustments that would allow better viewing of all the information that’s contained in a Nimbus dashboard, she says it’s already making reporting more compelling. “Instead of me sending a whole lot of figures on a piece of paper I can now send the Directors a visual, which is cool.”
According to Dougherty, “The staff I have been dealing with during the upgrade have been fantastic. They are very open to answering all my questions so that I have a complete understanding.” Nimbus has a lot to recommend it, she says, noting it was easy to learn and the upgrade process will mean their system is more accurate and will provide more useful business data overall.
Are you ready to master your business data? Let’s Talk.
