Traceability and automatic reporting with Charisma ERP

Company

TCE 3 Brazi , currently Agricost, is a privately held company, established in 1994, specialized in agricultural production, farming, animal and vegetal products processing, and last but not least, wood industry. These sectors define the holding’s organizational chart and ensure an effective integration of production. Each department has its own final products competitive both on the international and national market. In 2012, the company had 910 employees and its turnover exceeded 100 million euro.

The agricultural department is the most important in the company’s structure, with a total exploitation area of 59.335 Ha agricultural lands, situated in the largest agricultural exploitation in Europe, Insula Mare a Brăilei with 56.135 Ha and in Neamt county with a surface of 3.200 Ha. The latter is farmed in Zarnesti and Girov.

Livestock is the department with the most rapid ascension, starting in 1997 with Zarnesti dairy farm and currently holding 300 cows. Afterwards, the company purchased: Basta pig farm complex, with a capacity of 20.000 pigs annually, Baby-Beef farm which currently holds the biggest beef cattle breeding program in Romania, with a total number of 1500 cows and Girov farm with 3500 animals.

 

Challenge

In 2012, TCE 3 Brazi’s management decided to purchase an integrated software solution to manage the company’s financial-accounting activity, but especially the agricultural production and farming activities. Through a complete automation, the system had to streamline and simplify the activities regarding programming, planning and the management of raw materials, equipment and operations specific to an agricultural year (ploughing, sowing, harvesting etc.). After an extremely rigorous analysis of the ERP solutions existing on the Romanian market,Charisma Agriculture was the selected system, due to its flexibility and adaptability to the requirements of an agricultural manufacturer.

One of TCE 3 Brazi’s particular requirements was to integrate the cadastral map in Charisma and to visualize the parcels in the system’s interface. The company also required a graphical representation of the shape and size of the sole in cadastral coordinates, according to the national standard (Stereo 70) and to remove any error related to calculation or reporting to the state authorities. They also wanted a solution to enable the management of the livestock, breeding and animal reproduction.

 

Solution

The solution offered by TotalSoft integrates both the company’s and the group’s resources in a single software system (financial, human, material, and the resources specific to vegetal production and livestock). The most important functionality for the vegetal production was the graphical interface for internal reporting to authorities with land map controls.

Thus, Charisma for Agriculture allows to import certain files in a vector geospatial data format (shapefile) generated by GIS applications to establish the geographical coordinates. After saving the files in the database, Charisma users can view the maps in the system interface and can perform the annual planning of crops. Therefore, the crops saved in the map are saved as layers in the initial map, enabling to report and save the technological operations performed on each sole.

Charisma allows to post the reports on APIA’s web site (Agency of Payments and Intervention for Agriculture), and the accuracy is not altered by any human error.

Any operation registered in Charisma has traceability in the production module so that the reports regarding the actual resource consumption are done automatically (what equipment was used, who worked a certain surface, oil consumption)

 

After the benefits of the software solution could be observed, the next step involved the implementation of a module dedicated to the livestock management (animal breeding and reproduction). A special requirement was that Charisma could track all the movements done with an animal, from its birth to slaughter, and to report the data to NAIRS (National Animal Identification and Registration System).

The Livestock module in Charisma tracks the animal identification process in farms in detail, providing individual passports for cattle and horses with unique bar codes inserted in each animal’s ear tag. The passport is identical with the one imposed by the European legislation and contains data regarding the breed, parents, date of birth, the farm where the animal was born, exploitation, all the events occurred during its life (illnesses, treatments etc.)

The module also enables to record the daily food rations, based on methodologies with standard production recipes, as well as documents regarding the crossbreeding tracking.

 

 

For the dairy animals, there are automatic milking systems with a program that registers the milk production of each animal, in quality and quantity parameters. These systems will be integrated with Charisma to automatically transmit the data. The milk stock will be completed with all the related data (the time when it was collected, the animal, fat concentration etc.). Moreover, the production life of a cow will be tracked much easier, the system providing the production history with milk parameters of a certain animal.

 

Results

• The solution allows to report the crops and the technological operations performed during an agricultural year, on a certain sole, in the context of cadastral map;
• The inconsistencies between the company’s reports and the official data of The National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Publicity obtained via satellite were remowed;
• Based on the measurements made on each sole and the cadastral maps, the surfaces for the company paying rent to the state could be compared with the exploited surfaces. Thus, the real rent of the administered surfaces could be paid to the State Domains Agency;
• The registration mode of crops and their position on the map was corrected so that the reports to APIA correspond with the photos (maps) taken by this institution via satellite. Thus, after removing these small differences between TCE 3 Brazi reports and the photos taken via satellite, the company could obtain the state subsidies;
• The costs of the resources spent for each agricultural operation were reduced, and the control increased;

§  A better administrative (identification and registration), technical and financial monitoring of livestock in the farm;

§  Ensures the traceability of livestock during the livestock flow and automates the specific activities ( identification, registration, animal movement);

§  Integrates the financial-accounting data with production data;

• Automatically sends the mandatory data to state authorities, directly from Charisma, by interfacing with NAIRS, NAAR and NSVFSA websites.

 

Case study written in 2014