How Chelan Fresh Marketing improved data storage

A fruit sales and marketing firm has scanned nearly all of its documents into a database, and now accessing information on products is easier than ever before. 

The campaign to go digital began about 16 months ago, when Chelan Fresh Marketing employed an electronic database tool to keep track of information about the different types of fruit it handles, according to The Packer. A couple years ago the inventory system used by the firm was heavily based on paper – using checklists, information logs and other documents to track data on the company's various products. 

"There were all these little pieces of paper that facilitated how we managed inventory from the time it was picked to the time it was ultimately shipped to a customer," Sam Godwin, chief information officer for the company, told the publication. 

Switching over to a digital process
Over the past 16 months Chelan Fresh has gradually scanned all of the forms it previously used to track its business processes into document storage software that allows staff to more easily track products. Rather than sort through piles of information logs, stakeholders in the fruit buying and marketing process can now cherry pick the data they need on products from the company's database – pun intended. 

Not everyone found the transition easy at first, but in under two years the staff at Chelan Fresh has begun to see the undeniable advantages of having workflows streamlined with an electronic database. Now an easily accessible digital form that contains a picture of the fruit, the date of harvest and the pressure of the product, along with more information valuable to stakeholders. And if an order is rejected? An employee can simply log into the database, enter an order number and immediately pull up information on the product so he or she can determine what the issue is. 

"You can add a lot more depth to your data because of the flexibility of the tool," Goodwin explained to The Packer. "It could be used a lot of different ways but it is a way of enriching the information and tying it together so everybody in the process is more informed and hopefully come to better conclusions long term."

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