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Fairport Technologies News

September 2003

IN THIS ISSUE

» Welcome
» Roger's Ramblings
   » The UK Launch
   » FXA OpsSmart
   » PAM AusVit
   » New Zealand
» PAM's New Features
» PAM - IAR News
» FarmStar News
» Dealers News
   » FarmTek
   » Booth Technologies
   » AgBis
   » Maelroan Computers
» Farm Accountants
» In Closing

As always, September seems to have come around very quickly! The Fairport crew offer a warm welcome to all our new Fairport clients and to all our old ones as well.
Here at Fairport, we are proud to be working on the improvements to your programs and happy to be servicing your needs. This newsletter is packed with news and information. We hope you enjoy it.

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The last three months have been extremely exciting to say the least. In our June 2003 newsletter I promised there would be some announcements to come September … well some of those are still under wraps but you will read about some others in this newsletter.
The Fairport team has grown by two since the last newsletter. We have a new trainee technical support person (please be patient!) in Ed Wiese here in Perth and a new territory manager in Joanne Richardson (see the following article).
It was enlightening to see the recent Kondinin Group’s Farming Ahead magazine article on production recording software. We thank those of you who were surveyed and made positive comments. According to the survey results, PAM QA Plus had a 59% market share (the next program had 13%) and had a 90% “would buy again” rating and was the only program to get an overall 4 star rating. The others had 2 or 3 stars.
We really appreciated the feedback, both good and bad, and have already started work on rectifying some of the negatives.
We have now established our new business arm, “Farmtek Australia” in Victoria. With the help of its founder, Gavin Sargeant, we advertised for and subsequently employed a manager for the Farmtek operation – Joanne Richardson.
Joanne is based in Euroa near Shepparton in Victoria. She lives on a farm with her husband John where they run fine wool sheep and grow grain. She has been very actively employed for 20 years in the IT industry and in marketing products and technologies into the agricultural sector. We are delighted to have Joanne on our team and feel sure she will do a great job in keeping the Farmtek Australia business running well. Joanne is very qualified to run software training courses, so please take advantage of her skills.
As I mentioned last newsletter, Gavin and Christine Sargeant left their post at the helm of Farmtek to immigrate to Canada. They flew out on Tuesday 16th of September. We wish them well.

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In late June my wife and I travelled to the UK with Martin Evans from the Wheatbelt Trading Company (Mukinbudin, Western Australia) to set up a stand at the Royal Show.
We officially launched the Fairport product range at the show and we had plenty of interest. Martin’s parents Lloyd and Susan (who are avid PAM users) kindly invited us stay with them at their farm and extended very warm hospitality.
Congratulations to PAM users, Stephen and Claire Evans (see photo below) whose Simmental cattle collected first prize in their section at the show.

Click to enlarge


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On our way back from the UK through Asia, my wife and I stayed over in Thailand for meetings with the leading food tracing software company: the FXA Group. We formed an alliance (a global co-marketing and technology alliance) with FXA which has its headquarters in the USA but much of its business operates out of Bangkok.
To read the full press release and to find out more about this company and our alliance, please visit our web site or FXA’s at www.fxagroup.com.
Chatta Udomwongsa, the FXA head of marketing recently visited the Fairport head office in Perth for meetings.

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During this year I have been dropping in to Adelaide to form an alliance with the CRC (Cooperative Research Centre) for Viticulture here in Australia. The CRCV have been developing and marketing a series of software for their industry with the best known product being “AusVit”. The initial outcome of our alliance is that we will be incorporating the special features of AusVit into a version of PAM to be called PAM AusVit.
The desire is to launch the PAM AusVit product on the market early next year.







Click to enlarge

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In early August Paul and I flew to New Zealand to set up a new distribution arrangement there.
I have known Gavin McEwen since 1989 when he was the national (Australia) marketing manager of Dalgety Essex Technology – the outfit that was the national PAM distributor in those days. Gavin moved back to his homeland many years ago and he and his sister Heather run a very successful agriculturally focused IT company called Xenacom in the town of Cambridge. The man in charge of Fairport’s interests in Xenacom is Yann Ropars. Yann is a dynamic and talented man who has an excellent track record in marketing.
On the second day of our visit Paul ran a PAM training session for some of our NZ PAM users and the feedback from that session was excellent.
The “vibe” we got and are getting from NZ is excellent and we are looking forward to big things “over there”
The end of Roger’s Ramblings!

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Since our last newsletter the team has made excellent progress on many fronts. The following is a list of some of the more significant added features and some fixes to some old issues.

Enhancements to PAM’s reports and reporting system:

» Favourites: You can now specify a report as being one of your favourite reports. To do this, select the *(star) button in the Report Preview window. To quickly run this report again, simply select the Reports menu / Favourites and choose one of your favourite reports.

» Printing Selected Pages: You can now specify to print just one page or a range of pages from a PAM report. You can also specify how many copies of the pages of the report you would like.

» Labour Reports for Livestock Activities: Adjusted report layouts to show the Mob and Mob Group Name treated by the staff members listed in the reports.

» Inventory Transaction Report shows total spent on inventory items between two dates.

» A new Harvest Inventory Report grouped by the “Sold to” destination.

» Herbicide Resistance Report: Added a display of the chemical rate for each hit.

» Chemical Worksheet Report: If a Management Group was selected when the chemical application job was entered, that Management Group name appears on the report instead of all the blocks or paddocks.

» Chemical Plans Report: Now displays the total units, units per 100L, units per tank, total water volume and number of tanks for the job.

» Labour Reports: various improvements.

»"Operations and Financials Summary" report. This report is similar to the Annual Paddock Summary report but the report lists operations over a user defined date range. For Viticulture users the report also lists $/vine values for each operation and Paddock.

» Livestock Birth Reports: By Mob and by Paddock: Now shows totals for Mothers, Births and percentages.

» Inventory Transactions reports: You can now select the specific items you wish to report on.

» Soil test reports by Paddock & Crop now show soil test depth.

Other enhancements:

» Chemical Types: Added 2 new chemical types: "Attractant" and "Organic".

» Multiple Chemical Sheds: You can now generate reports on stock on hand by location & can select the location when entering chemical data.

» Machinery Cost Calculator: You can now choose to use the total costs (i.e. Fixed and Variable costs) as your default machine cost.

» Paddock Year Records: Paddock Season View: Now colours rows by Job like the Paddock Diary.

» Inventory: Inventory of Consumables and Harvest Produce: You can now specify a sort order for the display by selecting the "Sort By" menu.

» Paddock Season View: Manually Apportioning Job Costs (Tools Menu): If you have recorded an activity over a paddock and wish to assign the job to a crop, and the area of the activity recorded is greater than the cropped area you wish to assign to, PAM will now ask user if you wish to split the activity or not and leave the remaining area assigned to the paddock or assign the whole area to the crop.

» Data Entry: When entering a new Seeding/Planting activity PAM asks you to specify activities that have been recorded over the entire paddock to associate with the new cropping record. If the area of the associated activity is greater than the cropped area then PAM was automatically splitting the activity into 2 parts i.e. associating the activity to the crop with an area equal to the cropped area and the remainder as a separate activity. In some cases (for example, a spray job entered over an area greater than the arable area), this is undesirable. You can now specify via a check box option if you wish PAM to split the activity or not.

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Darren McGlenchy and Ben Gooch, have again been busy adding some very nice features to the Individual Animal Records section of PAM since our last newsletter.

New features include:
»“Off Farm” animals – any animals that you need to have in your list that is not on your farm can now be added to the system. Useful for AI sires and dead ancestors etc.
When setting up new Ear Tag lists
» The ear tag or Visual ID prefix field can now include numeric characters instead of just letters
» You can now change the order in which the ear tags are constructed. To do this, choose the "order" for each of the three group boxes.
» You can also now choose whether or not to use leading zeros when creating the Visual IDs (eg. "000150" with leading zeros or "150" without leading zeros)
On the IAR Trait Browser Screen
» New Text Export File System – you will see a new “Export” button: Having chosen a special list of animals and their traits, you pick the traits to export, then choose a file layout style (eg. Comma or tab delimited).
» New “Yards List” system – a report that has your selected columns on it plus empty columns for you to add data while in the yards.
» You can now calculate average weight gains and projected weights in this screen.
» User defined formulas are now easier to create and edit. Traits, weights and calculated fields now have their own buttons, making it easier to find the field you want. Average and Sum functions are now grouped with the "+", "-", etc... buttons. To get the average for a field, highlight the field then press the "Average..." or "Sum" buttons, press the button again to remove the sum or average off that field.
» When viewing animals on the main IAR window, the Visual ID is now the default sort order (eg. when you choose view "All Animals")
On The IAR Main Screen
» Improved the program speed when sorting columns on the main IAR screen's animal list.
» You can now choose to filter by ear tag when searching for an animal on the IAR main screen. Select the Show Animals / Filter Animals by... option where you can specify the Visual ID to filter by. The filter facility allows you to find tags from the text you type eg. if you type in "abc" PAM will find Ear Tags "ABC001" and "ABC002", etc..
» "Add" button - A new button to allow user to add a new single animal and its traits and associate it with a mob

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Laurie Smithdale has been very busy lately enhancing the FarmStar module of PAM and FarmStar Lite.
Here are some of the improvements:-
» New facility to import & export palettes, so that consultants can provide pre-made palettes for consistent results.
» When generating Yield images, the legend now automatically shows Area, Total & Average Yield.
» The Image legend now displays a histogram of the data
» After loading yield data, the chosen field now defaults to "Yield (T/Ha)" rather than "East"
» John Deere (direct from the card) and other new direct-from -the-card Yield data importers (due by mid-October).
… Plus many small enhancements and fixes too numerous to mention!

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Farmtek Australia News

From Joanne...
Gavin and Family have now officially moved to Canada and we hope to hear from them when they settle in. My first month on the job has been very busy. My main aim at the moment is to formalize allot more PAM workshops in the very near future.
We have re-launched the FarmTek web site www.farmtek.com.au which has links to Fairport products, new contact details and a facility to place an online request for training. We will continue to develop the site over the next few months.
I would also like to introduce and welcome Paul Drendal from Drenko Business Support. Paul will be working from his new revamped store in Horsham which also boast facilities for onsite training.
Over the next month I will be attending the Henty Field Days in NSW and Paskerville Field Days in S.A. If you are attending please drop by and introduce yourselves to me. I look forward to it.

www.farmtek.com.au
mail@farmtek.com.au

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Booth Technology’s Report

With what looks to be one of the biggest cereal grain crops in many years, confidence has returned to most rural communities. This has shown in the strong turn out to the major field days across the state. Dowerin Field Day and Newdegate Machinery Field Day both had record attendances.
All of us at Booth Technology have been out almost continuously setting up new clients and training existing clients refining their data entry methods and increasing their reporting capability’s. We will travel to any area to hold 1-on-1 or group training. Please call the office on (08) 9383 4443 or email sales@boothtech.com.au.
We will be holding a mixture of PAM Advanced Seminar Workshops (PASW), PAM Advanced Hands On (PAHO) Courses and PAM Mapping Seminar Workshops (PMWS) over the next few months.

Training and Seminar Timetable:-
Geraldton PASW 29th Sept
Perenjori PAHO 30th Sept
Dalwallinu PAHO 1st Oct
OBH Hotel PASW 3rd Oct
OBH Hotel (1/2 Day) PMSW 6th Oct
Wongan Hills PAHO 7th Oct
Southern Cross PASW 15th Oct
Merredin PAHO 16th Oct
Narembeen PAHO 17th Oct
Beacon PASW 21st Oct
Mukinbudin PASW 22nd Oct
Cunderdin PASW 23rd Oct
Gnowangerup PAHO 27th Oct
Katanning PAHO 28th Oct
Wagin PASW 29th Oct
Kulin PAHO 30th Oct
Darkan PAHO 4th Nov
Williams PAHO 5th Nov
Pingelly PAHO 6th Nov
Other venues can be arranged on request

PAM Advanced Hands On Course – We will be using the latest PAM QA version so bring in your backup if you have the current version (or we can arrange an update) or there will be some room for people to bring their own computer at some venues.
We will be covering the new major features that have been added in the last 12 months, look at what reports to use for analysis, mapping integration for data entry, map reports & Pocket PAM
PAM Advanced Seminar Workshop – Will cover the same areas as the hands on workshop but will be using a data projector.
Please call the office on (08) 9383 4443, email sales@boothtech.com.au or www.boothtech.com.au for more details and to book your seat(s) as there are limited seats available at some venues.
Some more regional workshops are yet to be finalised, so if you want a course in your area please contact us. Unfortunately we have limited time before harvest.
All the best for the up coming harvest.

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Agbis News

The last three months have been extremely busy for the Agbis Team with plenty of training and promotion in NSW and Queensland.
Matt Meehan & Greg Baker (Agbis Dubbo) demonstrated PAM at the Conservation Farmers Field Day at Emerald Ag College in July. Farmers from as far away as Coonamble, NSW, made the trip north.

In August, Chris Thannhauser, joined the Agbis Team as our Goondiwindi representative. In addition to providing Agbis training and support, Chris works as a BEELINE dealer. He has been providing BEELINE technical support for over 2 years.

Matt Meehan & Greg Baker displayed the Fairport range of products at Agquip 2003, Gunnedah. We had about 100 visitors to our site in 3 days so we were flat out. Matt and Greg stayed at the Catholic Convent during Agquip so they were on their best behaviour.

Matt Meehan, Chris Thannhauser (Agbis, Goondiwindi), Sarah Hall (Agbis, Qld Gold Coast) and Anthony Wallis (Horizon, Dalby) displayed the Fairport range at AgShow 2003, Toowoomba. During the breaks from demos, we were able to sample some outstanding coffees. By the end of the day we were well charged! We had about 50 visitors to our site in 3 days, which was a marked improvement on last year. Hopefully, things are on the way up in the Darling Downs!

Matt Meehan & Greg Baker displayed the Fairport range of products at the Cotton Consultants Association Production Seminar 2003. Matt gave a presentation regarding the Consultant’s features in PAM and this stimulated a great deal of interest.

Greg Baker and Joanne Richardson (Farmtek, Shepparton) will be at the Agbis Site at Henty 2003. Why not drop in and meet Greg and Joanne at the Computer Feature shed.
We are planning to hold Group Training throughout Queensland and New South Wales during the rest of this year and early next year. We will send invitations in the mail.
Workshops already planned include:
Wagga – Tuesday 30th September, 9.00 am – 5.00 pm, Wagga RSL Club
Griffith – Wednesday 1st October, 9.00 am – 5.00 pm, Griffith Ex-Servicemen’s Club

AgBis Pty Ltd
PO Box 1184, ARMIDALE NSW 2350
Phone: (02) 6772 9200
Fax: (02) 6772 9212
Mob: 0407 729 936
matt.meehan@agbis.com
www.agbis.com

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Maelroan Computers Esperance
Western Australia

We were blessed with beautiful weather for this year’s Newdegate Field Day. The good rains have made people much more positive than in recent years. Here’s hoping that the season finishes as well. It was great to catch up with so many of you at Newdegate.
We will be attending the Karragullen Field Day, Jerramungup Show, Esperance Show, Albany Show and Manjimup. We will also be attending some of the demonstration days for cattle NLIS (National Livestock Identification Scheme) to get a fuller understanding of what is required of cattle producers, and how we use PAMQA and the Individual Animals module for recording purposes.
I have been working with clients who are QA and others who are not, and finding there is an awful lot of incorrect information out there. If you have questions, please phone or fax and ask. Since the WA Grain Pool removed the Great Grains part, there are some records that you no longer have to keep, however, it is good business management to do so. PAM QA does most reporting now in a simple manner, and Fairport have always been receptive to requests from me for changes to improve the program for the user.
We are now set up with laptop and projector of our own for group training, so if you would like to participate in group training instead of one-on-one, please let us know. It will be easy to fit in our schedule now as we won’t be looking to hire equipment, and can use private homes, halls etc, as a venue. This applies to QA as well. There is an increasing interest in using PAM QA for crop budget preparation, thus requests for training.
Training: Farmbi$ current rebate for training is 75% (except QA). When I was there the other day, they emphasized that the scheme as we know it definitely finishes in June. So, if you want training, and wish to take advantage of the rebate, you need to book soon. We are on the road most of the time now, and have vacancies in November and December. We will be on the road in the New Year from mid January, and have bookings already. If you would like to be on the list, please either fax or email us with approximate dates and times you would prefer for training.
Thank you everyone for your continued support, and may your season finish well.
Cheers, Liz Alford
Maelroan Computers
Maelroan@bigpond.com
0428 910 122 / fax 08 90767042

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Does your accountant understand the role that no-till and guidance systems play in today's modern farming system? Edwards Marshall recognises that farming is changing and becoming more technologically driven. Edwards Marshall is a progressive accountancy firm based in Kent Town on the fringes of Adelaide, South Australia, and offers a full range of services.
Edwards Marshall is very proactive and offers far more to their clients than just compliance based services. They know that many primary producers now use a program such as PAM to record their paddock data with the overall goal of lifting their profitability. They work with their clients in using this type of data and by putting other strategies in place to help them maximise their business income.
Edwards Marshall has staff who are very familiar with rural financial programs such as Phoenix, as well as MYOB and QuickBooks. They have a broad range of rural clients in all types of industries. If you would like to find out more information please contact Michael Bagshaw. Ph (08)8139 1109 or
mbagshaw@edwardsmarshall.com.au

The Fairport Team wishes you all the best for the months ahead.

Until December…

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