First cut, three farms and one forager
It is first cut. Three dairy farms want to go this week, and the grass is ready on all of them. You have one self-propelled forager, two mowers, a rake, four tractors that can pull trailers, two buckrakes on the clamp, and seven operators, one of whom is a student on his first season and two of whom are also needed for spraying.
The plan is on a whiteboard in the yard office and in your head. Mowing goes first at farm one, then the forager follows, and the trailer drivers have to be at the right farm at the right time. Then a mower breaks down. Then farm two's grass is ready sooner than expected. Then an operator's child is ill. By mid-morning you have rearranged the whole day by phone three times, and one trailer driver is at the wrong farm.
Why peak season allocation goes wrong
The difficulty is not any single decision. It is that every decision depends on several others, and they change hour by hour.
| What has to line up | Why it is hard |
|---|---|
| Operators | Different skills and tickets, different hours available, some shared with other jobs |
| Tractors | Matched to implements by size, hitch and hydraulics |
| Implements | One mower, one rake, one baler: whoever has it, nobody else does |
| Trailers and chaser kit | Needed in numbers that depend on distance to the clamp |
| The customer's own kit and people | Some farms supply trailers or a clamp driver |
A whiteboard can show who is where today. It cannot show that moving an operator to farm two leaves the drill without a driver tomorrow, or that the only tractor big enough for the mower is booked on a baling job. Those links live in your head, and your head is also answering the phone.
What a muddled plan costs
The cost shows up as kit and people standing idle. A forager with not enough trailers waits. Trailer drivers with no forager wait. An operator drives across the county and back because nobody told him the job moved. At peak season every idle hour is an hour of work you are not doing for someone else.
It also costs customers' patience and your own time. A dairy farmer whose silage team turns up short-handed notices. And the person doing the planning spends peak season on the phone instead of running the business, with the risk of mistakes that comes with that.
An allocation board for operators and machinery
What we build is an allocation board that knows your operators, your machines and implements, and which of them go together.
- Each operator has a record of what they can drive and which jobs they are trained or ticketed for, entered by you, and their availability.
- Each tractor, implement and trailer is listed, with which tractors can run which implements.
- Jobs come from your booking board. For each job day, you assign a team: operators, tractors, implements and trailers.
- Clashes show immediately: the same machine on two jobs, an operator on two farms, an implement with no suitable tractor, an operator given a job they are not marked as trained for.
- When something changes, a breakdown, an ill operator, a farm moved forward, you move people and kit on the board and see the knock-on effects before you ring anyone.
- Each operator sees their day on their phone: farm, fields, machine, meeting point, and who else is on the job. Changes reach them with a notification.
It works alongside the whiteboard if you want to keep one. Many contractors put the board on a screen in the yard office instead.
A breakdown handled at the desk, not by six phone calls
At eight the second mower breaks down at farm one. You open the board, see that the only other mower is on farm three this afternoon, and that the tractor on it could come back by two. You move farm one's second half to the afternoon and pull one trailer driver onto the rake at farm two in the meantime. The board shows no clashes. The operators affected get the change on their phones, and you make one call to farm one to explain.
At the end of the day the board records who was where on what, which feeds hours and job costing.
Is your peak season plan on a whiteboard?
- Operators and machinery are planned in your head and on a whiteboard.
- Breakdowns mean an hour of phone calls to reshuffle everything.
- Kit and people are sometimes waiting because the team is not balanced.
- Operators turn up at the wrong farm after a change.
- You are not sure who is trained or ticketed for which job without asking.