Thoughts about digitalisation in my field of expertise
Today it would be hard to imagine a working day without a computer; actually it is my main tool in everyday work. In case of blackout it’s best to pack your bag and go home. Most of the communication with clients and suppliers is kept by email. This is good and bad thing at the same time: sometimes it feels that via email relationships are more shallow than they would be on the phone. But on the other hand all the history of conversations is kept online and you can check what was agreed. And you don’t have to rely on each others memory.
When I was a young kid my father worked for Nokia as a computer specialist. I was under school age when he quit his job from Nokia and started all-day farming for onions. Because of my fathers working history maybe digitalization came into our house earlier than in average home. We have always had computer in our house and my father had cellphone. We kids got familiar with those in very early age.
Nowadays we have a family owned farming company with about 40 employees. I could bet that as a farm we are using more than average farms digitalisation on daily basis. If you are interested, check out some applications about digitalisation in our company: “The biggest onion farm of Finland is running with an artificial intelligence”. The digitalisation is near to us in our everyday work all the way from fields to office tasks. We use both commercial and self developed programs; we have an own software developer who is making custom programs just based for our own needs.
We are using electronic working time records and that info is linked to the salary program. Sales are made eletrically and that info is linked to storage and material database. In food manufacturing traceability is mandatory and statutory. In our company the whole chain from field to customer is digitalized. Electric field cards are kept, every stage of field work is recorded and bets (vertilizers, seeds, etc) are recorded and total value of field is calculated. Tractors and their machinery are GPS-guided and controlled for better efficiency. Also tractor’s fault codes are digitalised. They can be read online by factory and support is provided straight from the factory engineers. Also most of the machines in our factory have remote connection to suppliers’ support teams. During harvesting season all the coming loads, tractor trailers and truck containers are boxed and labeled individually. With this label raw material is processed through whole chain from storage to customer package. All data is digitalised and traceable by the print in customer package.
In future with our traceability system we can have the carbon footprint for every single product we have made and processed. We are developing the system that our customers or consumer could scan the QR-code and is then able to see all the product data from field to kitchen (also the GPS data from the field will be open). We believe that the green values and willingness to know the origin of the food will still be the trend that is rising more and more in future.
We use also robotics in our company. Robots are used for work that is hard for employees, for example palletising that requires speed, precision and heavy lifting. In our process we are using also optical sorter where the rays are scanning onion cubes and it removes the bad pieces. The optical sorter is teached to accept variety of colours and it will remove pieces that goes out from that accepted zone.
In future amount of robotics will rise in farming. Farming work is often hard and we believe employees position will change from doer to observer. During the summer time monitoring of fields takes huge amount of time every day. We believe that in future drones will reduce time used for field monitoring and also they will give more data about fields. In future we also believe that automated tractors will arrive to our fields. We have already seen those in promotion videos so I believe that step is not so far away anymore.
Risks of open digital society
So many things have been digitalised in our company so the risks are also higher: malfunctions, destruction, temporary offlines or blackouts will affect and make production impossible because all the programs we use are web-based or online. Hacking into companies databases is happening all over the world and also our own privacy is endangered. There are parties in the world who are trying to steal personal identities or to achieve benefits by breaking into databases, programs or companies digitalised infrastructure. Company’s data security has to up to date constantly and handing over of your own personal information has to be well premeditated. You can protect your own identity by using strong passwords and by not handing them over and by changing passwords often.
Data protection reform
Affects of new Data Protection Reform can be seen in online transactions. Companies have been informing about changed law and effects of that on Company policies and usage of data about you. Companies have changed their online rules and relations and you have to agree them site by site. Because of new Data Protection Reform we had to update our personnel management programs also in our company but on our daily work the effects of that have been quite unnoticeable.
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Self evaluation
This was the first time when I wrote blog in English and also the first time when using WordPress platform. I think for me both of these need more practice to become fluent…
Digitalisation has been a hot topic for years already and I think I have been quite familiar with possibilities that it gives to us in our business. But this assignment was great to see this topic also as general and from the outside of the box; I enjoyed a lot when reading the blogs that other students have been written for this topic.