Resource management is defined as the process of managing and monitoring human resources by implementing a systematic approach that ensures existing and potential workers’ productivity levels are maintained on par consistently with the set benchmarks by the employers to let the organization stay competitive in the global marketplace.
Resource Management in Agriculture
Productivity can be measured for a single entity (farm, commodity) or a group of farms, at any geographical scale. Measuring productivity at the farm level implies collecting data on all the outputs produced and on the different inputs and production factors used. In principle, productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs.
Resource Management in agriculture mostly involves monitoring and management of workers and well as resources/equipment involved in farm activities on farmlands especially the large-scale ones, employed by agribusinesses. Attendance monitoring, task monitoring, training, and resourcing at this scale of the manual workforce becomes a challenge that companies face generally.
Labour management and monitoring were done manually through a tedious system of reporting and marking attendance, on-field monitoring by field agents, manual assignment of duties, and monitoring by individual assessment. This method proves to be tasking and non-lucrative on larger scales. These businesses need an efficient technological intervention that can efficiently carry out labor management and ensure maximum levels of productivity and utilization of resources.
Ag cloud platform – The Smart Saviour
Cropin is a state-of-the-art platform designed for agribusinesses that require managing their resources effectively. The solution has also been designed with a dedicated feature for smart labor management.
1] Attendance Monitoring:
Initially, the attendance management system was a tasking procedure. The ledgers that were maintained on each worker’s attendance were manual in nature and were done as paperwork. The system comes with its own set of flaws and was time-consuming in nature. The field agent also had to make sure the workers were completing the set tasks for the day correctly and monitoring completed tasks for every worker for the day was difficult for a single resource to do. This led to discrepancies and the factor of human error was something that could not be ignored.
Cropin eliminates the concept of human error through its efficient attendance monitoring system. The field agent goes onto the field and only has to mark the worker present or absent on the app provided. The entry of attendance no longer involves paperwork and can be done from anywhere through remote monitoring as well. The tasks planned for the day for each worker can be monitored and marked accordingly on the same platform. The system allows customisation of plans and the tasks can be attached to the particular resource and can be updated upon the completion of the task. This ensures no task goes undone and the time taken to complete the task per laborer can be analyzed. This helps agribusinesses understand individual resource efficiency.
2] Performance Management:
With large agribusinesses having hundreds of workers employed in the fields, it becomes a challenge to assess each worker’s performance and daily activities by a single or a few managers. Cropin makes life easier for these agribusinesses by providing a single platform for a field manager or a field agent to monitor multiple workers assigned to the farmland he/she is managing.
The farm manager is someone who plans out the tasks per resource and allocates them by generating a schedule and mapping each task to the resource. This process was done manually initially and there were inefficiencies due to human error and mismanagement of task scheduling. This ultimately can affect productivity on a major scale, affect yield and cause delays in product delivery.
Cropin comes with a ‘Farm Resource’ option where the duties to be fulfilled by the worker, commercial details and ownership can be recorded per resource. If the worker is assigned to multiple plans, each individual plan can be linked to the same resource that is performing the task and the progress can be tracked. For example, if 10 laborers on farmland are currently involved in irrigation, the plan can be created and assigned to those laborers, and tracking of progress per laborer can be done at ease on a single platform. This saves time and parallelly gives insights into each worker’s performance rate and the estimated completion time of the assigned task.
Companies can also generate schedule reports, and the cost value per plan can be ascertained through data analysis of each resource involved, their performance history, and the stipulated time for completion. The decision-making becomes data-driven and actionable based on the analysis of collected data only means a lucrative outcome for the company.
3] Automated Calculations:
The operational costs that are calculated for the project can be made visible on the same medium. The input costs, additional costs that are categorized under miscellaneous, and payments made to the laborers that need to be added to the ledger can all be done in one place, thanks to SmartFarm Plus.
The feature can be customized to the needs of the company. Cropin can even be used by agribusinesses who loan out advances to farmers in need of help in dire situations. A labor payment portal has been customized for a client that establishes sustainable value-added chains to provide Fairtrade organic foods from farmers. Cropin makes it compatible for integration with other digital agriculture platforms and systems to enable those transactions and disburse cash advances for the farmers smoothly.
Why You Should Use Integrated Resource Management Solution?
To understand the importance of a futuristic solution Cropin, one must understand the concept of Production Frontier.
Production Frontier is a theoretical concept that represents the optimal productivity target and has to be compared to observe productivity to measure the degree of technical efficiency (or inefficiency) at the farm level. The measurement of efficiency relies on the definition of the production frontier which may not be unique.
Source: FAO resource material for Agricultural productivity
When applied in terms of resource management, proper data analysis is needed to ensure the x and y-axis have accurate information to draw insights from. For example, labor quality differs across countries, type of activities, regions, and many other dimensions. High-skilled workers produce different output than low-skilled workers, which yields very different effects on production.
There is a need for a smart management platform that understands the vagaries and dynamic inputs that have to be considered while drawing insights. Cropin is designed keeping all these in mind and hence is the one solution that agribusinesses should implement and capitalize on.
Cropin stands uncontested owing to it being a cloud platform that can integrate and map other technologies that have been implemented together with all under one roof. This means everything can be monitored through a single integrated platform to not only gives an accurate analysis of data but also makes life easier and simpler through its centralized platform for monitoring.
In a world where technology is accelerating the growth of each sector rapidly, Advanced Ag cloud-like Cropin will prove to be the real game-changers in the AgTech space. Cropin is all about understanding data and providing the user with futuristic, actionable insights. The same idea when applied to workforce development will create a highly functioning, efficient labor management system that will exponentially scale-up company profits. This translates to the economy of the country being the real winner when viewed from a bigger picture perspective. Agribusinesses, are you listening?
As advanced as our capabilities are, we at CropIn believe in simplifying the end user’s experience while providing the best services we have to offer.
