Traceability; a key factor in today’s business world. Control; the main concern of any businessman. These two factors are the pillars on which the creation of a system, InOut Control, is based ready to challenge the laws of performance in productivity.

Every company, whether it is a product or service business, operates on two fundamental pillars: production and sales. On these two pillars, all activity takes place, directed by managers who assume their positions with courage and dedication. Administration, quality, cleanliness, safety. All focused on the same thing: Productivity.

Managers are used to the stress and pressure caused by last-minute unforeseen events, absurd failures in the chain of operations, errors in calculations or routine checks, etc. It is their responsibility to make activities happen, and when something goes wrong, the blame falls squarely on their shoulders. As a consequence, and perhaps most problematic, they waste too much of their precious time and valuable energy on identifying and solving these problems, creating unjustified burnout. As a result, they are unable to focus on what they really need to be doing: using their creativity and strategic planning to continue to grow the business.

All of this is the day-to-day life of those to whom this system is addressed: Operations Managers.

The creator of this system is Arie Shalev, commercial and customer service director at Provica, one of the largest security and cash-in-transit companies in Ecuador with more than 1200 employees working nationwide, and consultant in digital transformation strategies at the largest company in the agricultural, livestock and aquaculture inputs sector in Ecuador.

Because of his expertise in control systems and his knowledge of digital platforms, Arie identified a need in the security sector. Guards were not complying, not making the rounds, not beating their perimeter. They were falling asleep at night, or getting caught up with anything during the day. They just weren’t doing their job properly. So he decided to create software whose purpose was to make those guards do their job, without the need to employ an operational structure of constant supervision that would require large investments.

Later, because he also worked in the agriculture sector on a daily basis, he began to ask himself questions based on what he observed in the industry: “Why has this banana farm lost half of its harvest?” “Why so many kilos of shrimp that do not meet the fundamental quality requirements?”
“Why has this vineyard lost 30% of its yield this year?” His deep curiosity and desire to help caused his original idea to transform and evolve, in search of creating an entity capable of resolving all these situations.

And so it was how it was born what is now InOut Control, and after four years of research and development, as well as constant field testing, it became a system with a lot of personality, tremendously simple in its use, deeply adaptable and capable of supervising and monitoring any human labour. This is how it was opened up to the agricultural sector, which, although not the only one, is the one that is experiencing the greatest benefits in performance thanks to the implementation of the program.

A very clear example is one of the largest banana plantations in Ecuador, a country that dominates the ranking of the largest banana exporters in the world, with 3,682 million dollars. We are talking about a banana company of enormous dimensions with around 70 farms, one of the main clients and beneficiaries of the system. In fact, this company has implemented the system in all areas of its field activity: production, irrigation, supervision and security. They have created several thousand control points that allow them to monitor and trace every aspect of their work. As a result, they have significantly increased their production yields and, consequently, their sales. By having the certainty that the field staff can go over the entire land of each farm, hectare and lot, supervising and recording all events, they can anticipate many determining factors at harvest time.

It can therefore be said that the InOut Control system manages to combine the best of both worlds: human reasoning in the field and the traceability that only a technological system can provide. The results: Absolute control. Total stability and optimisation of production. Increased profitability. Avoidance of downtime. Reduced costs. Compacting the operations chain.

If we had to define in a few words and in a very colloquial way what this system is, perhaps “virtual nanny” or “digital butler” would come close to the concept. It is like an “omnipresent boss” that automatically controls and notifies absolutely everything. That every critical task is performed at the right time, that all daily and repetitive processes are carried out and that the human factor is always controlled and within traceability. Each area director, supervisor or manager will receive a notification, either when the task is done, when it is not done, or simply as a reminder or to report something new, or all of them. It doesn’t matter what the task is, this system adapts to everything. If the company already has form-based software to ensure the completion of tasks, so much the better; InOut Control is able to seamlessly interlink with the forms to assign checkpoints to them, just as you can import an Excel file loaded with hundreds of pre-defined tasks.

In short; it is a tremendously intelligent software that works incredibly simply and has faced the great adversities in Latin America; connectivity and “technological ignorance”. The issue of connectivity is essential, in fact on farms there are often many areas where no signal can reach. This is not a problem, as InOut Control also works offline; it is able to record the control point scan at the time it was performed and output the native data the instant the signal is recovered. What do we mean by “technological ignorance”? We should bear in mind that many people have little knowledge of the digital world, especially people in the countryside. And yet they use the system perfectly because of its extreme simplicity. No more than a miniscule amount of training is needed for them to start using it efficiently.

The goal and almost obsession of its creator was always “to make it stupidly simple to use and extremely efficient in terms of results”. And the results already speak for themselves; InOut Control is operating not only in banana plantations, but also in shrimp farms, coffee plantations, among other types of crops, and also in banks, factories, construction, as well as services such as cleaning, security and maintenance of residential and office buildings.

InOut Control is operating in Ecuador, Colombia, Chile and Spain, where it has just started up.