When the field visit became the contract

An export operation moved fruit across eleven species and multiple varieties, each with its own agronomic requirements and its own phytosanitary rules by destination market, inside an operating window of fourteen weeks. The agronomic team was the only part of the organisation that saw the fruit before it was committed — and none of what it saw was written down anywhere durable. Visits were coordinated over chat, transcribed by hand afterwards, and reported in documents that lived in personal folders. On the commercial side the same gap ran deeper: prospecting happened informally, supplier certifications were vetted in conversation, and the volume finally contracted was recorded somewhere other than the visit that justified it. The manual system had moved large volumes for years, and the argument was never that it had failed. The argument was that scaling on it introduced systemic exposure on compliance, governance and traceability, because there was no retrievable record tying what an agronomist observed in a field to the volume that was later contracted, the certification that was later claimed, or the rejection that was later disputed.

• A structured digital visit record covering the four kinds of visit the team actually makes — harvest, operational, commercial and training — each referenced to process and packing rather than logged as free text.
• Automatic report generation and distribution after every visit, replacing manual transcription and the redrafting cycle that followed it.
• Commercial prospecting carried out in the field, with supplier certifications (GlobalGAP, GRASP, Tesco) captured at the moment of the visit, so the agronomist became the first line of compliance control rather than the last to hear about a rejection.
• Volume commitments recorded in the same system as the visit that produced them, which is what turned the platform from a field tool into the record behind the contract.
• Centralised ownership of the data with real-time synchronisation, so a visit is retrievable by whoever needs it instead of sitting in the device that captured it.

1,365

field visits on record

83.6%

report generation rate

199 → 100

prospect-to-contract ratio

• 1,365 technical visits on record over the pilot window, split 684 harvest (50.1%), 317 commercial (23.2%), 271 operational (19.9%) and 93 training (6.8%).
• Report reach: 83.6% generated, 84.9% sent, 1.3% downloaded from the portal — stakeholders consume by email and push, not by logging in.
• 221,700 cases of stone fruit committed through the platform. Separately, commercial visits ran a 199 → 100 prospect-to-contract ratio (≈ 2:1).
• ~3,413 agronomist hours released (1,365 visits × 2.5 h saved), worth $85,313 USD of time reassignable to more field work.
• $265,000 USD of protected fruit, from a 1% loss-prevention assumption on the exported volume — a conservative industry standard for port rejection.
• $350,313+ USD of enabled value — released hours plus protected fruit only — against an estimated platform cost of ~$15,000–25,000 USD/year, giving a conservative ROI of >10x.
• $1.77M USD of committed contract volume recorded through the platform — 221,700 cases × ~$8 USD/case for stone fruit. It is not counted in the >10x ROI: the ROI stands on released hours and protected fruit alone.
• The universe the pilot sits inside: 22,514 export transactions, 177.48M Kg exported to 45 destination countries, across 419 unique receivers. The pilot's 1,365 visits cover a fraction of it.