A reliable solution that allows a manufacturer to effectively manage its supply chain can result in better quality control, optimized transportation, and a better return on investment.
For more than 70 years, Pandol Bros., Inc. has been providing customers with the world’s finest produce and service that’s second to none. What are the ingredients for this decades-long track record of success? Top products--fresh fruit and table grapes from the world’s leading growers, and innovative services that help bring these crops to market.
Pandol’s domestic sales & marketing team distributes table grapes, persimmons, blueberries, tree fruit, and other fruits to the United States and Canada. Pandol also exports apples, cherries, citrus, melons and other top quality produce to markets throughout Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, UK, and Australia.
In addition to their innovative sales and marketing efforts, the Pandol team helps growers determine how to best grow their fruit category and optimize transportation to maximize their return on investment. To prepare fruit for market, Pandol has an extensive quality control network with their own inspectors on site all along the supply chain from inspection to packaging.
Growing Web Access
Known for innovation, the company has long provided growers and strategic suppliers with online access to current inventory and important sales data. Each partner is supplied with their own private log-on access to their own harvest and sales data, available 24 hours a day.
A long time IBM midrange customer, Pandol had developed the OS/400-based extranet using the IBM Net.data scripting language that was integrated into the company’s custom-developed legacy ERP system.
According to Larry Nottingham, Manager Information Systems and Technology, at Pandol, “Net.data had significant limitations in terms of functionality.” When his Net.data programmer retired, and IBM announced the end of support for Net.data, Pandol began to look for a product that would allow them to offer new methods for customers and growers to access their data.
CYBRA Seeds a SolutionCYBRA Corporation, of Yonkers, NY, supplies Pandol Bros., Inc. with OS/400 printing software -- MarkMagic Bar Code Labels, RFID Tags, Electronic Forms and Report Writing Software for the company’s System i servers. CYBRA also is the developer of EdgeMagic Integrated RFID Control Software which was written with WOW™ (Web Object Wizard) a 100% Java™ based rapid web application development tool and runtime engine that creates “data centric” Internet / Intranet / Extranet applications.
WOW turned out to be the perfect tool for Nottingham’s requirements. He says, “WOW is much quicker to implement than Net.data. It gives us additional functionality such as the ability for the growers to download to Word or Excel, for example, we didn’t have to code ourselves. It was all already built in to WOW.”
“Over time,” he continues, “we will need to expand the information presented, and offer new methods for customers and growers. We want to continue to offer more self service, and WOW offers quicker application development, more functionality and that provides data that is readily available.”
The WOW application that Nottingham and his team built allows Pandol growers to log on and see:
- their inventory levels
- what’s available for sale
- what’s received (yield) by box
- what’s sent (season to date)
- inspection data with photos
- post sales information (what fruit sold for)
Larry Nottingham at Pandol has big plans for the future. He is confident that Pandol’s strategic decision to grow with the WOW development platform will be a fruitful one.
CYBRA Corporation is a leader in bar code and RFID technology for IBM Power Systems and other major computing platforms. For more information, visit http://www.cybra.com.
