Pekebun Generasi Berikutnya - Pengawasan berbasis data mengembangkan dinasti keluarga.

A family-owned oil palm enterprise, NY Hiew (Holdings) in Sabah, Malaysia, is embracing an operational evolution. Spanning 22,000 acres across 12 estates and 2 mills, the company is transitioning from legacy paper-based systems to a data-driven digital platform to ensure future growth and navigate the challenges of generational change.

• Name:            NY Hiew (Holdings).
• Location:       Sabah, Malaysia.
• Type:              Privately owned enterprise.
• Size:               22,000 acres across 12 estates and 2 mills.
• Crops:            Oil Palm.

For family-owned oil palm enterprises the transition between generations is a critical phase for both the business and family. The challenge lies in respecting proven traditions whilst trying to improve production using the latest in innovation, information and technology.

“Our estates needed a solution that allowed me to get more actively involved with the operations to monitor harvesting intervals and other field operations in real-time. Cultivate-Agri provides the ability to benchmark both performance and productivity within an estate or across estates.” said Mr KT Hiew, Director & Owner.

The transition from legacy paper-based systems to a digital platform presents any business with challenges. Changing mindsets and decades of entrenched work practices to accept new ideas is at the root of generational change.

The Challenges:

The leadership was committed to an “operational evolution” to position the business for future growth and address existing operational constraints:

1. Managing Generational Change:  New generations will introduce change through innovation, mechanisation, technology and biotechnology. The selected solution must support the latest technology standards and have the flexibility to introduce new processes and tools with minimal operational impact.
2. Managing every aspect of the Estate: The solution must support all estate operational activities: weeding, harvesting, pruning, planting, inventory (stores), equipment management, terrain (field) management, Cheque roll (worker settlements), worker management, onboarding and attendance.

Ideally, the solution must support WEB Services for integration with existing business management software for financials and payroll (systems like SAP, Oracle, Xero). Additionally, it should support Geographic Information System mapping, dashboarding, IoT devices, data imagery and documentation management. 

1. Lack of Centralized, Remote Oversight: The leadership required an ability to access and have remote oversight of estates’ operational activities. They also needed the flexibility to centralise and decentralise specific job functions for efficiency and cost control.
2. Inconsistent Processes Across Estates: With different field characteristics, environmental conditions, skills and practices across estates it made benchmarking and identification of urgently needed performance improvements difficult. The solution had to be configurable to replicate existing activities but also provide robust processes and standards to enforce process change. In summary a platform that supports operational change and not one that dictates how we must operate.
3. A Lack of Data-Driven Decisions: The leadership wanted to move beyond traditional management and gut-feel decisions. The management knew that data could be used to measure performance, identify potential areas for improvement and validate investment initiatives.
4. Technical obsolescence made it hard to support Current & New Technologies: With field IoT data collectors, weight scales, mobile phones, drones, GIS and satellite technologies flooding the sector, the owners needed a platform that supported these technologies and offered real-time data collection and storage in a centralised repository.

The Solution:

“With Cultivate-Agri in place, we are now looking at the estates using the data from processes to identify issues and areas of improvement. Whilst it is early days, the insights and potential identified areas of improvement reassure me that our choice and investment in Cultivate-Agri was a smart choice”.

Cultivate-Agri is an all-in-one Plantation Management Solution providing a single, central place to store operational data from source – manual forms, mobile devices, IoT devices, drones and satellites.

• Centralised remote monitoring and management through dashboards: Cultivate-Agri utilises dashboards to monitor and manage estates needing only an internet connection and a secure web browser. Dashboards provide the leadership with near real time transparency, identifying where and what work is being done, the people doing the work, the costs (labour, equipment & materials), the % completed and the productivity of resources on the activity.

Figure 1- Operational Field Job Monitoring in near real time

As an example, Figure 1 – Operational Field Job Monitoring provides a simple view of an entire estate workflow with the information maintained in real-time including:

• All activities that are scheduled to happen within the selected period but not yet started.
• All activities that are happening in the field, but no data has come back from the field to confirm the teams have started the activity.
• All activities that have been executed in the field and have one or more days’ entries recorded. This confirms the workers are working on the task.
• All activities completed and closed during the period.
• Following the workorder flow from left to right, the leadership can quickly determine % of work completed for the period.
• Instant notification of late or early started activities – this includes those who over-run forecasted duration (time) or cost.

Cultivate-Agri provides this information visually in real-time for any estate at any time of the day straight to owner’s phone or tablet. In addition to the operational monitoring the platform tracks the clerk performances, such as data entry times, days entered, average data entry speed and timing between transactions.

• Process Standardization: The organisation’s growth through acquisition introduced new people and new processes and the potential for a lot of change. This is where Cultivate-Agri excels – its ability to set-up and capture different process flows enables the business to take on new estates without significant change. However, lessons learned from the first estates adopting the system showed where there were improvements to be made on the new estates (see Highlight below).  Those improved processes were therefore easily implemented for the acquired plantation while allowing for necessary localisations due to terrain layout, etc.

Case Study Highlight: Fast adoption of improvement

Figure 2 – “The Lot System” digital chart, showing planned and actual harvest / excavation.

In this example, the organisation decided they would also include a physical re-blocking program of old cocoa blocks in addition to implementing Cultivate-Agri. The estates re-established the harvest schedules in response to findings from the earlier pilot which suggest compliance to harvest intervals and timely logistics would improve harvesting outcomes

The physical re-blocking of “The Lot System” along with the deployment of Cultivate-Agri is being done in parallel. Simple visuals identify:

• When the lot was scheduled to be harvested.
• When the lot was actually harvested and the number of days to complete the block.
• The bunch counts (from both harvesters dan the Driver/loaders).
• When the lots were cleared / picked up.
• The visualisation of the data facilitates quick identification of late or early harvest activities.
• Comparing harvester / loader totals, the operator can quickly identify unripe fruit, stolen, bunches left in field and\or harvester problems.

As in the example above, process improvement initiatives have become part of the business culture, leveraging technology and innovation such as mobile and IoT devices to shape future changes. Ideally reducing field responses from 36 + hours to less than 24 hours.

• Managing Every Aspect of the Estate – Landholders typically focus on yield and what it costs to produce the yield – traditional farming measure. (Yield being the volume of what you produce/grow and Costs being the people, equipment and materials it takes to produce the yield)

Cultivate is unique in managing estate operations being, designed to manage all estate activities from a single workflow. The workflow includes integrated stores, managing workers wellbeing, settlements and co-ordinating equipment to do the work. In addition, Cultivate-Agri provides both logical and physical tracking of produce (Fresh Fruit Bunch or FFB), the people and equipment in use. Traceability from source ensures a complete platform for managing and monitoring estates.

Cultivate-Agri has both productivity and production monitoring. Productivity can be benchmarked by person, by gang, by activity, terrain or by the equipment used.

• Data-Driven Decisions via KPI Benchmarking:  The earlier NY Hiew implementation focused on ensuring the robustness of the core transactions and estate activity management. However, now that those processes have been improved the more recent estate rollouts increasingly focus on the reports and dashboards. The platform adopts a simple philosophy for reporting and monitoring:
  • Dashboards provide status of activities: All agricultural enterprises might plan but then they must deal with day-to-day changes presented by mother nature, vendor unpredictability, worker illness, etc. Reports produced now are typically out of date within a few hours of printing. Therefore, dashboards serve the purpose of showing data in real-time, reflecting any changes and their impacts on the business.
  • Reports are utilised only for transaction recording (eg: weighbridge receipt, worker payment records) or for reporting financial / operational historical periods.

At NY Hiew the use of Dashboards represents a change in management culture – where previously estate information was largely captured and reviewed at the end of month (“what happened?”), the estate leadership is now looking to dashboards daily (“what is happening, what actions do I need to take now?).  Thus, expectations are now changing with a need to see data recorded as part of the new daily work processes, not simply updated monthly for end of month finance/payroll, it’s a platform for our entire estate operations, not just worker settlement.   Cultivate-Agri ability to record activities in the plantation on a hand-held device as they happen and upload over internet connection gives estate managers and owners a significant boost in their ability to maximise yield by reacting immediately to changes rather than looking back on a lost month’s revenue.

 “I told Cultivate I preferred dashboards over reports for my operations. Traditional reports and spreadsheets are ‘out of date’ within minutes of being printing, just wasting paper. Dashboards are dynamic, graphical, real-time and money saving. With volume, the data helps us to identify trends which was previously not possible.”

Dashboard Examples:

Dashboards in figures 3 and 4 below provide the estate with high-level bunch weight statistics and a more detailed view of the sub-lot averages.  Whilst the data was available previously, due to its sheer volume and the manual nature of the work to record the data (retrospectively!) this information was never useful to managers. With Cultivate-Agri, that data is now presented as timely, actionable information for estate leadership.

Figure 3: Dashboard – Bunch Weight Statistics.

Case Study Highlight: Old KPI to new insights via Dashboards:

Average Bunch Weights (ABW) are a weight-based indictor of crop yield typically used for payment of workers and based on a monthly average., As an operational indicator, however, it can mask several problems, which is why it is often discounted as a useful business KPI.

Figure 3 above identifies ABW trends for mature / immature blocks over several years showing a macro view of the blocks in general.

However, Figure 4 is where a block is reported by sub-lot and the weights are distributed on a load-by-load basis (not at the end of the month). Weight distributed on a load-by-load basis minimises comingling distortions, even with ramps involved. The overall block picture becomes a lot more refined, identifying inconsistent weight figures and anomalies.

Figure 4: dashboard showing marked improvement in the consistency of sub-block bunch weights across estates.

These weight anomalies are typically found to be caused by field workers entering incorrect data – a key operational insight and learning from the benchmarking data available since system adoption to date:

The data speaks for itself; such anomalies and outliers are typically cause for investigation but were not easily visible previously.

For example – does a declining bunch weight indicate a soil health problem, an operational handling issue or a simple data recording issue or none of the above?

• Identifying and knowing sub-block / lot yields more accurately allows the business to look more closely at logistics optimisation and determining which equipment is better suited to the terrain’s conditions.
• Problems previously masked by block reporting, are now transparent with the more accurate distribution of weights.
• Changing behaviours is made easier when managers have quantifiable evidence to base those changes upon.
• Disrupting the perception that co-mingled stock via a field ramp, field bin or collection centre cannot be traced. Whilst in principle this statement is true, Cultivate-Agri is able to provide a level of traceability with co-mingled stocks.

Summary

At NY Hiew the staged adoption of Cultivate-Agri over 36 months is not without challenges.  An operational estate adopting a generic farm management platform that evolved in consultation with the owner and managers to include new, key functionality for the Oil Palm industry with cheque roll, dashboarding, attendance management, IoT integration and GIS mapping all standard was an exercise in cooperation and understanding between Cultivate-Agri and the plantation team.

As of June 2025, the solution has been deployed in 5 estates including 2 pilot locations and 3 new estate locations. The business is now on track to complete the remaining 7 estates before the end of February 2026 (12 estates in total).

Business Benefits:

• Empowered Remote Management: The leadership can now remotely monitor all estates via dashboards on their mobile devices.

          As the business moves towards mobile and IoT and they look at centralising and decentralising some roles, they know Cultivate-Agri is ready to support the change.  

• Data-Driven Operational Insights: Visual dashboards are provided for operations, cheque rolls, production yield, costs, productivity and system validations. These will be further enhanced as the teams identify areas of improvement to develop a comprehensive set of KPIs that can be applied and used across all estates.  

Dashboarding allows the team to quickly identify issues like late harvesting, unripe fruit problems, or bunches left behind, and then drill down to find the root cause. The leadership team is moving towards monitoring productivity and benchmarking estates; however, it recognises that this requires a fundamental cultural change that embraces improvement and competition.

• A Foundation for Trust and Evolution: By providing transparent, unfiltered real numbers the platform earns trust and has become an indispensable tool for owners and managers, making it easier to quantify and justify operational changes.
• Improved Consistency: Monitoring metrics like average bunch weights (ABW), block excavation timing, worker productivity over time helps the team to identify, implement and monitor improvements.

Ready to future-proof your family business and move beyond gut-feel decisions?

Contact Cultivate today to start your operational evolution with Budidaya-Agri, the proven platform for data-driven Oil Palm plantation success.