To improve profitability, Queensland persimmon producers and Persimmons Australia Inc have identified a need to drive digital transformation in their businesses. Conceptualised by producers, the Persimmon Weekly Market Report is fostering digital transformation across the industry and is set to become an essential business decision making tool leading a more market focussed and profitable industry.

The Persimmon Weekly Market Report is a persimmon specific digital reporting system to inform and direct producers’ activities around supply to market, packaging and price negotiations thereby allowing them to grow new and existing domestic market opportunities, increase their responsiveness to future market disruptions and improve their resilience.

In 2021, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland, an online data entry portal was created for data collection. This created an efficient and cost‐effective cloud‐based data exchange system for analysis. The Data Entry Portal is being rolled out across the industry this season.

The growers have suggested that there could be advantages of having an app developed for a standalone click through data entry process. The app may also offer opportunities to deliver reports and infographics from the data analysis process directly to the end user.

The level of engagement displayed by producers clearly demonstrates their willingness to drive digital transformation in their businesses and adopt and integrate the Persimmon Weekly Market Report as a critical business decision making tool.

The development of an app would further refine the process of data collection, analysis and reporting in transitioning to a cloud‐based data exchange system. Expected Outcome:

• A dedicated app for data entry and report delivery for the Persimmon Weekly Market Report program.

• A sustainable and a cost‐effective end‐to‐end digital solution.

• Digital interfaces which are user‐friendly and useful for persimmon producers.

• Increased confidence and use of digital technology across the industry.

Queensland persimmon producers are well placed to maximise the benefits from an app as their fruit is the first to enter the Australian market each season in late February‐early March due to the varieties grown and seasonal conditions, thus providing a strong incentive for adoption.

Additionally, as the only persimmon suppliers in the domestic market for several weeks, Queensland producers could have greater control over increasing returns and profitability. Similar opportunities exist for exporting, where Queensland persimmons have a unique supply window with little to no competition in key markets throughout Asia.

The management of the project was shared;
Each member of the team was aware of the project expectations.

The approach taken to producing the plan was discussed and roles for each part of it were distributed among us.

From the lectures it seemed implied that we were able to apply a mixture of project management strategies and I think we did do that quite well.

Exploring what worked for our situation was important as students taking on a project as a group. Being a group that had never worked together, met one another, or taken on a group project in a professional setting

The project plan and it’s required sections was something that took a lot more time to construct as it was more like finding details to fill the sections, rather than simply having those details to list. So, in that respect it was more challenging that an actual project would need to be for an established business.

The idea of phases forced us to think about how the project would be developed, and made us realise what needed to go into the development .

This project was completed entirely remotely, we didn’t once meet up, yet the tasks that suited collaboration went quite well via MS Teams. At least once a week we would schedule a meeting and the times for those meetings were confirmed to be acceptable by all members.

The meetings we had helped us organise tasks and schedule times to complete them by. I took some time over the break to attempt to make a prototype, consisting of just the data entry page and linking the form from it to a database, hosted on a NAS.

After demonstrating the way it functioned with a short screen captured video Joshua went ahead and did some research on how we could use azure, which falls under the Technology Reflection section, but the teamwork side of that was how he passed on what he had researched to the team and explained in a Teams call how to replicate his settings.

I think that was the point from on which we worked most effectively as a team on the actual development of the project.

The technology used by our team in this project was amazingly useful for us,
all working remotely.
I personally hadn’t used MS Teams, but it was acceptably intuitive,
I did develop a grudge on Microsoft a little bit for some of the layout choices and positioning of certain options, but that was just until I became more familiar with it.

Azure is really useful, initially though it was overwhelming to use due to the abundance of tools available combined with the use of glyphs without labels and then even when they do have a label, it’s as if they had specific instructions to not be intuitively understandable.

Our requirement was just an SQL server and to host the site, there must be about ten different ways one could accomplishing that on azure and not until exploring them would anyone know which suits them or which is available to their location or account type. There were changes that affected the layout to make it vary from examples shown in tutorials, but I became familiar with it with time.

Visual Studio was used, and I found that simple enough to operate in, and especially found the way we used git very helpful in being able to collaborate in the project’s development.

This was an interesting aspect, there were very subtle differences in our backgrounds and our situations but I think I realised that actually cultural similarities rather than differences should be things to be aware of in a team setting, when the majority of the team share for example the experience of completing the agile course, that brings to the team a very important cultural similarity.

In that we all are aware of much of the same things that go into a project. The importance of communicating, what goes into risk analysis, the benefits of doing things certain ways were subjects we didn’t seem to need to go into detail about or discuss much.

The most important thing I learned from this project combined with the Agile Methods course was that a group being equally aware of the same things, having matching comprehension of details that aren’t obvious, that most professionals had to work decades before realising and formulating ways to implement.

All of us having that experience as a shared cultural background was and is a very beneficial quality of our team and I think the entire ICT industry.

Again, with a shared understanding of industry based ethical standards for ICT, and the understanding of the importance of respecting and upholding them.

With honesty, legal compliance, competence and diligence, confidentiality, professional development, and integrity being the backbone of how we operated.

It didn’t need a lot of attention, any time a subject that came up in discussion that could potentially invade privacy or threaten to go against the teams ethical standards we all acknowledged how best to go about it ethically, for example discussing with the client their existing user details, we were very upfront about details that we wanted while reminding them that we didn’t want or need any information more than necessary to providing their required features.

I enjoyed this project very much, it was a fulfilling challenge that has made me realise the value of my communication skills, creativity, and technical ability.

I’m proud to have been able to contribute to this project and am satisfied with the process and the product of its development.

We produced something I think exceeds the initial goals of the project.
That could easily be implemented to the benefit of persimmon growers associated with Persimmons Australia.