Small, organic animal farm gets productivity boost from FileMaker

Sea Breeze Farm is a small, grass-based animal farm that sits on the edge of an island in Puget Sound, Washington. For all of its quaintness, however, Sea Breeze has used FileMaker to improve its efficiency and profits, allowing it to be as effective as many large farms. FileMaker has helped the farm align closer to its sustainability mission by eliminating its need for paper-based record keeping and transactions and maximizes efficiency across operations with real-time synchronization. 

As employees go about their daily tasks on and off the island the information they enter using FileMaker Go, FileMaker's free iOS app, on their iPad is instantly synchronized and updated on the back-end in FileMaker Server. For example, employees use this capability to note which types of milk are used in making cheese rounds and identify how long each round has been aged. In the wine cellar, FileMaker Go has replaced clipboards for entering alcohol levels, pH readings, sulfite additions and historic data related to wine lots, while replacing paper notes with "all on the same page" database entry.

In Sea Breeze's restaurant, a custom point-of-sale (POS) solution created in FileMaker Pro helps Sea Breeze Farm track which dishes are selling, allowing the chef to create daily custom menus, which are updated in FileMaker Go. Sea Breeze employees use the same POS system using iPads equipped with FileMaker Go when they sell items at a farmers market. The team can track what is sold and the items are instantly deducted from the master inventory on the back end. 

FileMaker allows businesses to quickly create and run solutions that work seamlessly across iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac and the Web. At MC Services, we offer FileMaker training, support and custom programming. Contact us today for a free consultation to see how you can benefit from our custom FileMaker services.