Going ‘e-bananas’

Clark Special Economic Zone – "E-banana" or "electronic banana" is how infotech journalists describe bananas now being produced in Davao del Norte and exported under the brand name Del Monte.

The tale of the e-banana started with the nightmare of undertaking an inventory of 20 million boxes of bananas being exported annually to Japan, Hong Kong, China, the Middle East, Russia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand using a "Jurassic" accounting program based on Cobol.

Thus, faced with the challenges of the new millennium and the threat that one day, the banana production in the South might face a predicament vis-à-vis the assiduous advent of the information highway, the Tagum Agricultural Development Co. Inc. (Tadeco) was forced to break new grounds in order to further simplify the processes of its voluminous transactions.

Tadeco, which has a 6,236-hectare complex in Panabo, Davao del Norte, is regarded as the country’s largest banana producer. Established 50 years ago, it is the flagship company of the ANFLO Group of Companies that originally made a mark in abaca production before shifting to exporting bananas.

It was two years ago when Tadeco implemented a P7-million project to discard its Jurassic inventory systems based on Cobol, a second-generation computer language that was used in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Ed Villaver, the firm’s vice president for MIS and corporate planning, described their telecommunications and data link facilities at that time as very dismal.

Then, the company chanced upon Match Data Phils. Inc., now known as Microsoft Great Plains Phils., a division of software giant Microsoft Corp. that provides "business applications that help small and mid-sized companies become more agile in today’s interconnected economy." The computer firm then introduced to Tadeco its business solution software called Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics.

While still bound to Cobol, Tadeco MIS manager Gigi Mercado explained that "human intervention was very imperative in every step of the inventory process."

For instance, she pointed out, "if there were errors in data input for the previous month, the person in charge of the task had to identify which consequent data would be affected by the error, then he had to go to that data and change it himself."

The reason behind this is basic: Cobol was never developed to become a fully integrated system, so one data input would not necessarily affect the others.

The dynamics of Dynamics

Microsoft’s Dynamics has been described as "a cost-effective, easy-to-implement solution." Its business management and accounting capabilities are Internet-ready. Besides, it can be integrated into Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic applications, as well as into other industry-leading e-business software applications.

"At the time we evaluated the software, it was only Great Plains that offered the features we were looking for (Tadeco’s) system," said Mercado. "Almost all our requirements were met."

"Dynamics takes on the whole accounting process," she added. "Even from the start, when a purchase is made, it will be recorded in the payables and then it goes directly to the general ledger. It automatically notes the vendor’s code, account code and item code, and automatically affects inventory and the whole stock balance."

The banana-producing firm described the software as "close to accurate, if not one hundred percent accurate."

Moreover, Tadeco executives said that under the Cobol system, it took them more than eight hours to make reports. But the effort could only be done in 30 minutes under Dynamics, even as the software could also be "customized" for the company’s other needs.

Villaver said easy tasks at the plantation "even became easier."

Microsoft Great Plains promoted the Dynamics software to infotech journalists in a three-day team-building affair, dubbed "E-xplore 2001," at the Mimosa Leisure Estate here recently, using the "e-banana" as a testimonial to the business solution for small and medium-sized companies wanting to join the infotech rush.

Hopefully next time, there will be other "e-fruits" and "e-vegetables."