The whiteboard in the foyer of the agribusiness consulting company has been replaced with a touchscreen thanks to the efforts of Otago Polytechnic students Dean Huakau and Matt Ankerson.
In the final year of the three-year bachelor of information technology degree, students were required to carry out advanced project work, applying skills learned in the degree programme to produce a project for an external client.
Mr Huakau, a former fisherman, and Mr Ankerson, who grew up on a farm and had done an internship at AbacusBio, got along well and decided to team up, creating location-recording software called CloudStaff.
Students did not have to come up with the project idea, or the client. They were given help with that.
AbacusBio software development manager Mark Teviotdale, himself an Otago Polytechnic graduate, was approached about a project. He looked around the company's Dunedin office and chatted to a few staff.
Whiteboards were used in the front of the office to outline whether people were ‘‘in or out'' and, if they were out of the office, when they would be back.
It was decided there was potential to systemise that and make it funkier and more attractive than a simple whiteboard.
Talking to farm consultants in the office, the topic of health and safety on farms arose, Mr Teviotdale said.
As well as having a product that recorded the movements of their own staff, and managing visitors, it could hopefully be used as a product on-farm, with a hazards register built into it.
Mr Huakau said the pair, who won an award for the most commercially viable product, encountered a few ‘‘stumbling blocks'' that they had not envisaged, but the problems were not insurmountable. ‘‘We just put the hours in and treated it like a job and got it done,'' he said.
It was made so it could be easily upgraded and AbacusBio could tailor-make it to its company and ‘‘take it to the next level''.
Mr Teviotdale said the pair did an excellent job and AbacusBio was now looking at commercialising the technology on the farming side.
The great thing about the third year of the degree programme was working with real clients to build a real system, he said.
The two had meetings with Mr Teviotdale every fortnight, discussing what they had been doing and any challenges they had encountered.
For Mr Teviotdale, it was great to be able to give back something to the polytechnic, which had helped him in his career.
Visitors to AbacusBio were asking about the touchscreen and it was also proving effective for administration staff, who could quickly determine the whereabouts of staff, who number between 30 and 40, he said.
Joy Gasson, Otago Polytechnic's bachelor of information technology team leader, said the industry project tried to give students experience of ‘‘what it's going to be like out in the real world'', within a structured environment.
A successful project like CloudStaff was really the basis for interviews when students were then applying for jobs.
Mr Ankerson, who has since started a job in Wellington, and Mr Huakau had a very successful group dynamic, she said.
