A section of the Jamaica Broilers' plant in St Catherine where it grows chicken. - File

The Jamaica Broilers Group has installed a US$500,000 (J$40m) computer-based inventory management system that will allow it to track its products, real time, from even before they enter the warehouses as raw material to the distribution of the finished items to customers.

Jamaica Broilers, the island's producer of poultry and a manufacturer of animal feed, said that system will enhance efficiency across the group and pay for itself in 24 months. The company also has a nascent, and thriving, ethanol business, but the system does not extend to its energy division.

"With faster deliveries and the improved accuracy of the system, we estimate a conservative return of well in excess of the capital outlay, with a payback period no more than two years," said Christopher Ramdon, who is in charge of information technology at Jamaica Broilers. The technology - Mobile Enterprise Mobility solutions - was supplied by Motorola.

Increased speed

Until now, much of the group's inventory tracking demanded manual data entry, but the use of bar-coding and scanning technologies will not only increase the speed at which the work is done but increase accuracy by limiting the likelihood of human error.

Explained Random: "The ability to scan a label and retrieve the exact billing information electronically removes any possibility of human error. Data over cellular networks has allowed real time transactions, which allow automated reconciliation of sales data. And if customers request it, we can retrieve invoices for an exact case sold to them on a particular day."

Moreover, the ability to capture quickly the specific characteristics of a particular shipment, for instance, is important to a company like Jamaica Broilers, where the information within the same batch may not be standard.

"Most of our products carry non-standard weights," Random said. "A case of A-Grade chicken for example may vary between 18 kilograms and 25 kilograms. The ability to scan a label and retrieve the exact billing information electronically removes any possibility of human error."

sabrina.gordon@gleanerjm.com