Wireless Technologies at Farmers Foods Introduction On 15 December 2002, Myles Kerby, IT Manager at Farmers Foods, an industry training organization in Jamaica, evaluated the results of a 5-month pilot of Telecom’s Mobile Lime. Mr. Kerby was impressed with the potential benefits that mobile data transmission could bring to their organization. However, he was concerned with the maturity of this emerging technology as well as the costs involved. He wanted to determine whether they should adopt this new service. A snapshot of rural Jamaica Jamaica was a modern developed economy with a population of approximately 3 million people that enjoyed high standards of living as well as one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. Owing to its geographic isolation, the country was heavily dependent on trade, particularly in agricultural products. It used to be said that Jamaica had 20 times more cows than people. By 2001 this was no longer the case: there were only 12 times as many cows as people. Despite the declining numbers of livestock, the agribusiness sector was still responsible for more than 20% of the country’s GPD and for approximately 65% of all Jamaica’s exports. One of the problems faced by the rural sector was attracting young people to join its workforce. The difficulty to fulfilling the growing demand for skilled labour in this industry was jeopardizing its future. In order to address this issue, the government started funding apprenticeships. Under the Industry Training Act, these organizations were responsible for setting national skills standards and qualifications, administering on- and off-job training as well as developing standardized assessment arrangements. Through an apprenticeship scheme, ITOs offered to young people high quality, mentored, work-based learning. Farmers Foods Farmers Foods, one of the largest training organizations in Jamaica, was a not-for-profit organization with the objective of helping people to gain the knowledge and skills they needed for a successful career in the agriculture sector. It offered Jamaica Qualifications Authority (JQA) registered and nationally recognized qualifications in industry sectors ranging from dairy, goat and cattle to rural servicing, wool harvesting and water industry services. Since it mostly served people in rural areas and some other remote locations, it had offices in St. Elizabeth, St. Catherine and St. Thomas that helped coordinating and delivering training and education at a regional level. Funded by government and industry, Farmers Foods supported earn-as-you-learn training courses for farm employees in the Jamaica agricultural industry. The organization was in charge of enrolling, facilitating, tracking and supporting the progress of the trainees. In addition, it was required to send data on the progress of each trainee to the Tertiary Education Commission. Trainees were a mix of school-leavers and mature agricultural employees who needed to up-skill and move forward with careers. They gained their qualifications through a mix of practical and theory-based study arranged by Farmers Foods’s field-training advisers. Practical training took place on the job, with trainees learning the ropes from experienced farmers and employers, while theory-based training happened off the job through accredited training providers either through day-release classes or distance learning. Trainees completed courses while still employed, and this education was paid for by the trainees or by their employer. In the course of 2002, Farmers Foods facilitated training for approximately 3,000 people through out Jamaica. Every year, they processed about 200,000 trainee results and over 450,000 attendance records. In December 2002, Farmers Foods had 59 employees, consisting of 29 field-training advisors, 10 field managers and administrators and 20 head office support staff. Training Management System By the early 2000s, Farmers Foods was an organization buried in paper. Its manual system became so backlogged that, at peak times, field staff would turn up to visit a trainee with no up-to-date information on the person, their course, or their progress. The average time of response for a request from the field staff was 3 days and trainee enrolment was a 3-week process. At worst, entering trainee data into the system could fall 9 months behind. Early in 2000, John Kerby was employed as IT manager and immediately began to work towards the implementation of a training management system (TMS). The vision was for a fast, modern, easily administered system unique to Farmers Foods’s needs and environment and which would provide it with tools to meet key data requirements. In July 2000, the TMS project received board approval and, by July 2001 the system was rolled out to all staff. The TMS handled course results, attendance details, statistics, and produced various reports and forecasts. When the TMS roll-out was completed it had an immediate and profound effect on the organization’s efficiency and capacity – improving access to any type of data about trainees, providers, accreditation, standards, employers, and workplaces. Kerby expected that Farmers Foods staff would rush to the new system and embrace it on the spot. However, he soon realized that one of the biggest challenges with the TMS project was getting people to use it. ‘We had a few people who weren’t computer literate at all and some who were a bit too literate and kept playing with settings and changing things they shouldn’t.’ Consequently, between July and December 2001, each Farmers Foods staff member received several hours of training. As a result, by early 2002 the TMS was already widely adopted throughout the organization. By the time the system had been securely implemented, field workers received Compaq laptops loaded with the application, office applications and synchronization software. As a result, data could be entered in the field, and later synchronized with the TMS via a regional office network. Field staff also had access to TMS data as up to date as the last time they synchronized with the system. One of the major issues faced by Kerby was the limitations of telecommunications in the rural sector. ‘If you talk to our staff on a rural phone line you can often hear the tick, tick, tick caused by electric fences. Imagine what would happen to data’. Also most field staff drove about 5 hrs per day visiting farms where phone jacks were not available in ‘the next barn’. Unwired Telecom Jamaica started a pilot of a new data service called Mobile Lime. The service was based on Telecom’s 027 CDMA2000 network. CDMA2000 was an always-on packet data network that supported peak data rates of 153.6 kbps. Because always-on packet data networks were a shared medium, and wireless services were dependent on the signal strength, real-world user experiences were typically less than the peak and in the range of 60–80 kbps. As part of the pilot, Farmers Foods’s field staff received GTRANt Wireless PC cards to be used on their laptops. Kerby thought that wireless data transmission could give them a second option of telecommunication for areas where a telephone line was not available or with poor data transmission rates. During the pilot, field staff were able to send and receive information at most sites and database synchronization was able to happen when they were driving or in the middle of farmland. However, network coverage was limited, especially in rural areas Kerby estimated that about 25% of Farmers Foods’s clients were based in an area that had no network coverage at all. Staff seemed to gain confidence in doing their job due to the increased accuracy of the information they were able to retrieve. Most Farmers Foods’s training advisers told Kerby that having access to this sort of technology made their life easier, and they were able to work more efficiently. One of the field-training advisers mentioned: ‘I am out in the field to field three to four days a week and only one or two days in my office. To me, the benefit of having this technology available means that I can access information when I need – not having to wait until I get back to the office in the afternoon. Also because I work in isolation it was great to be able to pull over and check my e mail via wireless data’. In addition, field staff noticed that they could respond to inquiries from trainees on the spot, without the normal 2 weeks delay and the consequent likelihood of losing their interest. Also Kerby observed a ‘wow factor’ generated by wireless technologies – customers were impressed with the new system. It certainly could contribute towards the company’s image. The final pilot report showed that the average usage of wireless data per person was 100 Mbytes/month. In addition, data transmission was underperforming – probably equivalent to a 29 kbps modem – and costs of acquisition and maintenance were quite high. Conclusion In order for Farmers Foods’s field staff to continue accessing the Mobile Lime service, Kerby would have to purchase hardware and choose a one of Telecom’s wireless data plans. He wondered whether Farmers Foods should adopt a service based on emerging technology.

Identify the types of costs, benefits, and risks that Kerby needs to address while making his decision to adopting an emerging technology?

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