Stephen Taylor first started growing soft fruits in 1978. Since then Stephen, his family and loyal staff have grown Winterwood Farms into a thriving soft fruit business comprising 12 farms across 4 different countries and have become the largest independent UK supplier of all year round Blueberries with the majority of UK supermarkets as customers. Operating from 50 acres of good soft fruit ground in the Kent countryside, Coombe Farm and the recently acquired 16 acres at Haven Farm (both operating under the banner of Winterwoods Farms) process their own crops of Raspberries, Redcurrants, Blackcurrants, Blackberries and Gooseberries at their own state of the art on-site packhouse.

In addition to processing their own fruit, this packhouse also processes fruit procured from 5 other UK growers and a further 16 overseas growers across 10 countries. The geographical spread and climate conditions of the UK farms ensures that seasonal home grown fruit is available on the supermarket shelves for the longest possible period, whilst the procurement and processing of fruit from their overseas partners provides the continuity of supply required to satisfy the UK shoppers appetite and the demands of an all year round business. Recognised globally as experts within the soft fruit industry, Winterwood Farms is run as a "family business" valuing the integrity and loyalty of not only its suppliers and customers, but also its staff. Owned and operated by Stephen, his wife Jackie, their son Terry, daughter Alison and a loyal team of 33 key staff, the packhouse also houses the offices from where they co-ordinate the growing, processing, procurement and distribution sides of the business. In addition to the core team, there is an extremely flexible workforce of up to 100 packers and around 80 pickers.

Central to the efficiency of the packhouse and the farms is the continued development of integrated systems and skill-sets allowing seamless inter-changeability of staff between packhouse and field. This flexibility enables the packhouse to quickly respond to changed or late orders, and the farm to respond to sudden changes in either the weather or changeable order quantities for the different fruits being harvested. Stephen has always championed continual investment in equipment and systems that either improve and enhance processes or deliver cost or time efficiencies across the business.

“When we planned our new packhouse we specified that wherever possible the main systems and equipment across the farms, packhouse and offices should integrate together to ensure that unnecessary effort or duplication was eliminated” said Stephen. “I’ve always been a believer in eliminating the need to constantly print things out so that someone else can retype the information back in. I’ve dealt with Applied Principles since early 2005 and have always admired their dedicated approach to the elimination of paperwork within their products”.

Winterwood Farms first started using the Principles Quality Manager software to automate their quality control, asset tracking and health and safety audits in 2007. QA auditors now carry out regular sample checks and shelf life checks using handheld Hornet PDA’s to ensure that strict standards are maintained. The Hornets unique ability to scan barcodes and RFIDs, accurately measure temperatures with its in-built probe and take detailed photographs with its 5 MP camera means that the data transferred in real time back to the server is far richer in detail than any manually completed paper record could convey.

“Although highly computerised already, there were still areas where paper forms were being used e.g. in QC online checks and also elements of shelf life recording. Our previous paper based forms have served us well to date,” said Stephen, “but the Principles Quality Manager adds another dimension to the way we perform our checks as well as making the data available in real time to anyone with a network connection. If data entered falls outside parameters that we set, the screen will deliver follow up tasks and checks that should be completed. We set these and can even set alerts that are sent by e mail or SMS to designated individuals. As the information is live across our wireless network, any irregularities or non conformances are caught immediately enabling us to minimise wastage and the risk of further problems down stream.”

Winterwood Farms have always prided themselves in their multi lingual and multi cultural workforce. This mix has meant that communications with overseas producers has rarely been affected by language barriers but it can have its drawbacks.“Training someone to carry out audit checks is much easier now as we can set up tasks and checks on the system in that persons preferred language. When they logon to the PDA, they can select which language is to be used. This drastically reduces any areas of ambiguity or opportunities for error.”  .

“Winterwood Farms are far from unique in their requirements;” commented JJ Kotze, Managing Director of Applied Principles, “every business with a requirement for manual checks to be carried out can benefit from our system as information fed back is not only more accurate and less prone to accidental error or intentional omission, but is also easily traceable and instantly accessible either by staff on site or off site management via the web interface. We were able to walk into their business and install the software so that it interfaced directly with their existing Access databases. This not only saved time but also satisfies Stephens’s desire that all systems should integrate as closely as possible.”

“We’ll probably look at getting some more PDAs in the near future” commented Stephen, “I can already see more applications that the devices and software would be suited for that we had not originally contemplated”