Field Operations Management: A New Approach to Planning, Control and Accounting

As practice shows, the use of GPS monitoring in agriculture is very effective. Direct control of movements and fuel consumption helps to exclude inappropriate use of machines and fuel drain, and also makes it possible to minimize non-production downtime of equipment and low efficiency of its work. In addition, GPS monitoring systems include the formation of databases on cultivated hectares, the distribution of fuel for moving and work, provide information on the performance of work in the context of agricultural operations, fields, equipment, machine operators and make it possible to introduce precision farming.

Until recently, there was a unified classical method in the Soft.Farm system, which allowed manually calculating the number of hectares cultivated. Every morning the clerk entered information into the program, filled out the necessary forms and closed the fields. This work was time consuming and the resulting display results were not user-friendly. In this regard, our team has developed an innovative concept of automatic closing of completed field work, which has a modern visualization and displays the usual planning in a graphical form.

The Agroplan function is a part of planning and performing field work based on GPS-monitoring data of equipment from different integrators of GPS equipment in one system. Soft.Farm provides access to information from platforms such as Wialon Hosting, Wialon local, Wialon Pro, SKT Globus, Control Plus, DozoR, FortMonitor, AutoGRAPH, Teletrack or John Deere and helps to reveal all monitoring capabilities. The main idea of ​​the new functionality is to create a modern automated workstation for the accountant with clear visualization of field work and their simplified automatic closing. Now there is no need to enter primary data into the system on a daily basis, such as agricultural operations or the width of attachments, as well as create separate field operations for each field, since very often the same technological operation is performed on several fields and duplication of processes in manual mode leads to ineffective use of time. The system takes all the tracks of the equipment per shift, breaks them down into works, crossings, parking lots, and automatically creates field works for the key operation, machine, geofence, etc. in accordance with the agrotechnical requirements of soil cultivation.

«Agroplan» makes it possible to add to the planning any operations and the timing of their implementation, indicating a geofence or several geofences. When the tractor crosses these sections on time, at the end of the shift, an order for the already planned operation will be automatically created. When adding a technological operation, you can specify the width of the attachment and then the number of hectares performed will be calculated online. The system will show in which field the equipment is operating, what is its area, how many hectares are planned to be done, how much has been done in fact and how much is still left to process, and it will also calculate the fuel spent on a specific field and on a specific crop. Using the timeline, you can view the progress of operations not only online, but also for a specific date or shift, and thanks to an advanced filter, you can organize data by dates, geofences, power machines, operations, departments, shifts, statuses and performers.

The new graphical visualization of field work displays in detail the tracks and the high-speed mode of operation of the equipment, fixes the operating mode, the speed above and below the norm, shows the worked area, gaps and overlaps, which helps to track violations in compliance with technological standards. Also in the Soft.Farm system there is a function of automatic field closing. It corrects errors and inaccuracies of the GPS signal and allows you to close the field by 100%. At the same time, the web service distributes the cultivated hectares between the machine operators who took part in the cultivation of the field. As a result, a complete report for the shift is generated, on the basis of which a field work order is created with the display of all summary information, including equipment tracks. The report makes it possible to reduce unnecessary double-checks and signatures — the system will do everything automatically. It is signed by the accountant and transferred to the accounting department for salary.

The concept of automatic closing of field works makes it possible to control the performance of technological operations, record possible deviations during field work and exclude forgetting to close them, that is, the human factor. Prompt display of information in the Soft.Farm system helps to control the entire process and make timely management decisions.