The Netherlands and Australia
June 2021

Samantha Harrington is working for South Pacific Seeds as a Seed Production  Specialist. She is involved in the production and processing of vegetable seeds at their head office. She also has a role in implementing ABS to suit the processes and the functionality of the system.

South Pacific Seeds is a vegetable seed company based in Australia with several subsidiary companies in New Zealand, Chile, and USA. Their core business is marketing of vegetable seeds and the multiplication of seeds under contract. Samantha explains both processes on sales and production:

• Sales

SPS is not a breeding company and markets seeds on behalf of global seed companies within Australia. Seeds are sourced from global seed companies and marketed within Australia. SPS has sales representatives in all states of Australia. 

• Production

SPS produces seeds under contract to global seed companies in southern Australia. In producing these seeds, SPS utilises many growers in southern Australia to produce seeds on their behalf under guidance of production agronomists. After harvest, processing and quality testing the seeds are exported back to the customer and sold in the global markets.

SPS was using an outdated DOS based system and change was needed. Several different programs were evaluated at the time. A decision was made to utilise ABS as both our Sales and Production divisions could use ABS. SPS went live with ABS in 2008 and gradually implemented one section at a time over a 12-month transition. This move to ABS was a significant improvement in SPS workflow and traceability.

SPS works with 45 users on a daily basis in the production, processing, quality and sales departments.  Whilst many more intermittently use ABS for reporting in the field.  All staff would use SAP reports derived from ABS to assist in their work on a daily basis.

At this moment SPS uses ABS, SAP and Office 365 as their main software’s.

We asked Samantha: What are the advantages of ABS Seed?

ABS allows for the traceability of seeds easily from the stock seed, through the production, processing and quality until the seed is shipped and invoiced.  This has improved our workflow considerably. Users are also able to check inventory, status and quality results as they are released or entered in to ABS. Reporting of information is all a key feature and we utilise many automated reports through SAP, that are send on a daily, weekly and month basis.

And, what problems have you experienced?

When we have an issue, we are able to report these to the ABS service desk and they are acted on in a timely manner. If we have a requirement to implement a feature in ABS, we are able to schedule a meeting and discuss the features with the developers and work on a solution and a time frame for these to be implemented.

What plans has SPS for ABS Seed?

We are continuing to develop ABS with our workflow and each year we are improving.  We are currently working on improvements to our grower settlements, and anticipate these to be implemented with ABS later this year in the next version.

And as far as SPS future developments are, “ we can conclude that SPS is continually developing it’s process, supported by ABS!!”