Employee data is in the "Employee's Only" section.
15 February 2010
Last week I showed off a fancy Excel spreadsheet I created. This week
I'm going to show off another database management tool I created. It's
kind of like a spreadsheet but simpler yet fancier. It's simpler
because there's no complicated math involved yet it's fancier because I
wrote it in PHP and installed a custom database on my website.
It's a spreadsheet to manage all the coffee picking data during harvest
season. It's up and running on the website right now but since it
contains my exact harvest numbers I don't really want to share it with
the world so I hid it in the secret "Employees Only" section of the
website. Yes, my website is just like Disneyland with secret tunnels
that lead to the "Member's Only" bar above the Pirates of the Caribbean
ride. I have more than one "secret" page on my website but this is the
only one I'm going to tell you about right now. I'm not too worried
about trespassers because the secret pages are all guarded by the gecko.
If you spend any time looking through the "Potential Income from Kona
Coffee Farming" spreadsheet then you'll quickly notice that the single
largest expense is paying the pickers. If I didn't have to pay pickers
then my income would nearly double. Because of this fact, I have put
some serious thought into building a Kona coffee picking robot.
Unfortunately, as simple of a job as it is (look for the red cherries,
put them in the bucket, repeat), robots still aren't up to the task.
So, for now at least, I'm still reliant on humans.
Since I have to pay the humans, and that's by far my largest expense, I
need to keep careful track of how much coffee each person picks. The
pickers are paid by the pound so everyone gets a different amount every
time they pick. With a large crew, I can end up with 30 or more bags
per day. Each of those bags is marked with the picker's name then
weighed. Keeping track of all those weights isn't too difficult but it
does require some organization. That's why I wrote my picker
spreadsheet.
I could have simply used Excel but that wasn't good enough for me. I
enter picker data often enough that I wanted a solution custom tailored
for the job. When entering hundreds of numbers, the number of
keystrokes and mouse clicks required for each entry starts to add up so
having an efficient entry form becomes important.
I decided that having the entire thing online would be nice too. By
logging in to the website, the pickers can access their totals any time
they're near a computer. That's great for the picker boss because he
often needs to see the numbers when I'm not available. Being
employees, the pickers can access the secret website pages. Too bad
you're not an employee. 
Having everything online also means the data can be entered from any
computer. That means any employee, like for example a farmer's kid,
can enter the picker weights right from her very own laptop. Now all
I have to do is convince her that it is more fun than playing Farmville.
Well, maybe not more fun but certainly more realistic.
A big advantage of having all the picking weights in a central database
is that I'll be able to easily track trends. I'll be able to compare
one season's harvest to the next, see which field is the most productive
and what time of year I can expect higher or lower yields. None of
this requires a fancy computer database but having cold, hard numbers sure
does make it easier and more accurate. Sometimes it's surprising how
real data can show a different picture than intuition does.
I wouldn't have bothered with all this effort except that I used to be
a programmer. Occasionally my nerdy side needs a little attention
too. Writing some computer code to manipulate a database usually
does the trick. Especially if I get to put it all on a secret web
page when I'm done. Even if I don't glean any lofty insights from
all this, it will still be nice to have all the information in an easily
accessible format. Anything will be better than the pile of scribbled
notes that I have been using until now.
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