Case studies

The technology platform revolutionising quality control through real-time tracking, alerts, and analytics.

Fresh Produce

The Manbulloo Experience

Manbullo, Australia’s largest grower of premium Kensington Pride mangoes, also known as the ‘Bowen Mango’

The Situation

Manbullo is a company that grows and distributes mangoes across Australia and the world. Growing mangoes here in Australia, the company has a high-pressure, three-month period to grow a year’s worth of mangoes for export. It’s essential they get this right and that their product arrives at its end destination at the optimal ripeness for its intended markets.

This ripeness is driven by two factors: the temperature it’s stored at and the time the mango was picked. So, they need to track these temperatures accurately while stored in their facility and throughout the shipment journey.

Most producers of mangoes aren’t handling these capabilities as they don’t have the capability to intervene (or so they think).

Manbullo was using an older technology. They’d been using USB data loggers — but these needed to be collected at the end of the trip and plugged into a PC for the data to be accessed. The success rate for retrieving USB loggers was less than 50%.

“Even when the loggers were retrieved, we couldn’t intervene during the shipment as we only found that something had gone wrong after the fact”, mentioned Scott Ledger, Research and Development Manager of Manbullo.

The Challenge

The challenge was to provide Mambullo with a tracking system that provided visibility throughout the supply chain and enabled actions to be taken in real-time to modify the handling conditions and consistently deliver the required shelf life.

There are multiple stops along each shipment’s journey and produce being unloaded, inspected for quality and ripeness at each step in the chain. The mangoes travel in palletised units which makes it difficult to access individual cartons. Manual inspection is time consuming and costly and requires trained labour to be available at the required time, often at an inconvenient time. These stops would cause the produce to lose significant shelf-life once it reached its destination.

Of course, Manbullo looked into alternative solutions but none had the capability to share the data they needed in real-time. It meant they couldn’t intervene, when conditions were less than optimum, or the holding durations was too long. There were similar solutions with real-time data tracking. However, these solutions lacked:

Easy access to shipment history and simple data interpretation. Insights could not be easily drawn as further analysis was required to provide useable information.
Real time visibility throughout the chain. There were limitations with airline accreditation, Bluetooth functionality, and WiFi capabilities. This resulted in large gaps in the data provided.

The Solution

Manbulloo’s ideal solution was a single dashboard, where we could set up the loggers with a high level of customisation (logger ID, batch codes, steps in the chain, optimum temperature ranges and so on), and access all data in real time, regardless of when it was captured and what logger brand was used.

That’s where Tracknact came in. The software was developed so Manbulloo could track and record time x temperature conditions during packing and transport through the chain, and during storage and ripening by our chain partners.

Now, we can open one dashboard and see the time x temperature conditions for all shipments — whether in real time or as a historical shipment.

What has been achieved

Today? Manbulloo operates with full visibility of handling from the packing shed to retail distribution in-market. They’ve reduced the avarage arrival temperature in Asian markets by 5 degrees Celcius and added an additional 2.4 days of shelf life. Their ability to deliver consistently premium produce has resulted in an increase of their reputation with customers, and strengthened relationships with chain partners, resulting in significant export growth.

We discovered that no shipment was the same. We didn’t assume the handling conditions in the supply chain were optimal but implementing Tracknact enabled us to pinpoint the temperature issues and take actions to improve handling at all steps in the chain.

We found that temperature varied between cartons within a pallet and between pallets in different positions in transport vehicles (road, rail, air). Tracknact unlocked insights into handling conditions at each step of the shipment journey and importantly, this enabled us to work with our chain partners to make the necessary improvements and achieve consistency.

We’ve enhanced accountability and performance in our export chains. Our partners along the chain can follow the shipment and receive alerts when conditions are outside the critical limits. This has shifted the focus to working together to improve performance. The benefits gained and the system introduced has an ongoing impact that exceeds the cost of investment in this innovation.

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