Just make it easy.
Farming involves a lot more work than you think, and even if you introduce various tools and products, the reality is that you cannot utilize them or take the time to study them.
There are a variety of production management apps and work management services, but we wanted to create something that was easy to use right away.
I guess it’s the same in other businesses and industries, but I always tell myself, Just make it easy!
That’s what I always tell myself as I think about it.
We want to make work records easy to understand (and as cheap as possible).
Let’s get right to it!
We wanted to create an easy, cheap, and usable way to keep track of our work and daily communication, so GDPS adopted google forms as our input method.
The contents have been adjusted, but the input items as of January 2021 are
(1) Entered by (required)
(2) Work location (required)
(3) Contents of work (required) → optional may be acceptable
(4) Progress of work (required) → may be optional
(5) What you learned
(6) Ideas for improvement
(7) Things you want to share with us
(8) How are you doing today?
Please note that this is only a daily report, not a work logbook. The data of who did what, when, where, and by whom is built by another service. I will introduce that elsewhere.
I would like to make it so that each employee can take a step forward every day by sharing what they have learned and improvements they have made. Ideally, it should be something that people want to input voluntarily.
See below for instructions on how to use the google form.
Data-driven agriculture
We wanted to make it easy to check and look back on the data, because it would be useless if we couldn’t utilize the data, even if we stored it in daily reports and work journals.
The aggregate of the google form is automatically compiled into a spreadsheet ( like Excel), so you can check it by looking at that.
But if that’s all you say, you’re a designer! You’re a designer!
I wanted to take it one step further and make it easier to understand, so I borrowed the help of google and used a service called google data studio.
It’s called a BI tool, and in simple terms, you can think of it as a service that converts your data into graphs and other things that are easy to understand!
The following is the daily report confirmation portal created by GDPS.
Each of them is designed to make it easy to check the information they have entered.
Each input data can be reviewed in retrospect by changing the period setting at the top.
REPORT is mainly for things that are urgent and that I want to make sure everyone knows about.
In STUDY, we write down what we studied and learned that day. It’s great because each of us can share what we’ve learned, and it creates an atmosphere where the whole team can take a step forward.
In IDEA, I try to write down things that could be improved and ideas for implementing them, if possible. Our mission is to increase productivity, so I want to be able to think about how we can improve this work.
WORKAREA visually displays who was working in which field on that day and how long they were in the field for a set period of time.
By comparing the content of the work with ideas for improvement, we can analyze whether there are any factors that are lowering productivity, so that we can improve the work in the next year and beyond.
As for CONDITION, at the end of the daily report, I put “How are you doing today? at the end of the daily report, but I realized that this was quite important.
There are three levels of response: good, normal and bad. What is the cause of their bad condition? It gives me a chance to talk to them. I think this is a good way to start a conversation and to increase team productivity.
For weather information, we use Weather News to display climate data near the field, and the google data portal is good because it makes it easy to display external services.
Here’s how to use the google data portal.
The problem with writing and no one noticing
One of the bottlenecks we faced while operating this daily report for a year was the problem of sustaining motivation to write it and the problem of no one seeing it even after writing it.
It’s important for the whole team to stress the importance of data, but as the number of employees increases, we can’t afford to do that, so we wanted to make it easy to notify people of what we’ve written and what we’ve communicated.
So we made it so that we can be notified via LINE when we input the daily report.
When the daily report is sent, whoever is in the LINE group updates the daily report and notifies the LINE group of any contact information.
This is the only way to eliminate almost all coordination errors.
How to use IFTTT is as follows.
All of our services so far have been free!
I challenge you to continue to share information that can HACK agriculture!
Thanks.
