Last week, one of our growers had their time tracking software go down for an entire day. In the middle of harvest. Crews in the packhouse. Managers scrambling. HR bringing back paper tickets. That outage? It ended up being the last straw. Here’s how we helped them, and what their scramble to switch vendors taught us:

‍

Don’t wait until it breaks to switch

The outage was bad, but the truth is, the cracks were already showing. Confused workers, and HR bottlenecks kept cropping up. No ROI. A week later, they decided to switch to a new system because waiting had already cost them more than switching ever would.

‍

In-season changeovers are brutal, so minimize disruption

New vendor onboarding mid-harvest is a nightmare: retraining, new hardware (iPads, etc.), lost productivity. The safest move? Keep workflows identical. Harvust was auto-sending new hires to their old time tracking system in real time, but the new vendor wanted them to manually export CSVs from Harvust and import them into their system. That would’ve tanked productivity. We fought for a seamless API integration and won. The result: zero retraining for employees.

‍

Interdependence demands leadership

Even though the grower was happy with our service, the interconnectedness of today's farm labor management software meant that we had to step up because a different software failed. We got into a Zoom meeting with the new vendor, mapped the integration from Harvust to them, and built it fast. No “scope of work” memos, no weeks of internal red tape.

‍

My takeaway from this experience is that when your tech goes down, you see who your real partners are. Look for ag HR software that is truly centered around giving you the best experience, and providing tangible results to your staff, not more work with no payoff.