“It’s like building a brand new home on the concrete pad of an earlier house.”
MyApiary
Darren Bainbridge used to be hobbyist beekeeper. Now he’s the founder of MyApiary, the top commercial management software system for the apicultural sector.
As a hobbyist, Darren noticed that part-timers and commercial enterprises alike faced a common problem; every aspect of apiary management was manual. Scheduling. Deploying resources. Forecasting. Job creation. Job logging. All done on spreadsheets, whiteboards, and notebooks.
Darren saw a need in the market and came to NetValue for a software solution.
Commercial realities meant Darren needed a bespoke apiary management system in a hurry. Darren had an idea. A few years earlier, NetValue had created management software specifically for agricultural contractors. JobFlow had all the management features Darren wanted, and he also liked the visually appealing front end of JobFlow’s UI. Darren suggested we use and modify the backend of JobFlow but rewrite the frontend for beekeepers.
It's like building a brand-new home on the concrete pad of an earlier house.
Before repurposing JobFlow, the NetValue developers spent time with Darren to understand how the end users worked in their beekeeping world. What tasks are involved? What kind of things need recording? What level of data extraction and reporting was required? What about scheduling and forecasting, and resource allocation?
Not only did the retooled software need to match the practicalities of a beekeeper’s job, it also needed to be scalable. The same system that worked for a side-line beekeeper also needed to satisfy the commercial apiary that owned 22,000 hives on a variety of locations.
LAYERS OF COMPLEXITIES
Large apiaries have their hives spread over different regions throughout New Zealand. That means multiple beekeepers managing different sites. For MyApiary to serve its purpose, it would need to provide a high degree of synchronisation and cross-referencing within a multi-tenanted platform.
It took NetValue 6 months to successfully build MyApiary on the architecture of JobFlow and get a working system in the field. Bees have never had it so good!