Client PortalManaged IT for food production
IT Support for Food Producers and Processors
For a food manufacturer in Melbourne's south east, a systems failure rarely costs a day. It costs the ability to answer a question, and the question is usually asked by a customer, an auditor or a regulator who is not going to wait while you look.
Which batch, from which ingredient delivery, went to which customer, on what date. If the answer lives in a spreadsheet on one machine, or in a system nobody has ever restored, that is not a records problem waiting to happen. It is a recall problem waiting to happen.
Want the number first? Our pricing is published: AgileCORE from $85 and AgileCOMPLETE from $130 per user per month ex GST, plus the AgileSECURE add-on at $44. Estimate your monthly figure in two minutes, or book a conversation.
The test you do not get to prepare for
A recall is measured in hours, and it is a records exercise
Traceability one step forward and one step back is the standing expectation in Australian food regulation, and every retailer audit asks for it in harder terms than the regulation does. Nothing about that is a technology question until the moment you have to produce it at speed, and then it is nothing else.
00:00
The call comes in
A customer reports a problem with a product, or your own testing does. From this point everything you say has to be supportable later, which means it has to come out of a record rather than out of someone's memory of the week.
02:00
Scope the batch
Which production runs used that ingredient lot, what else ran on the same line, and where did all of it go. This is where businesses discover that half the chain is on paper in the plant and the other half is in a system only one person understands.
24:00
Account for it
Customers, the retailer, possibly the regulator. The difference between a contained withdrawal and a full recall is usually how precisely you could define the affected product, and that precision was decided months earlier by how you keep records.
We are not your food safety consultant, and we will not pretend to write your program. What we do is make sure the systems your program depends on are managed, backed up, restorable and reachable by the people who need them, including at 10pm on a Friday.
Why generic IT struggles here
A food plant is a hostile environment for equipment
Wash-down areas, cold rooms, humidity, gloves, hairnets and a floor that is cleaned with a hose. An office support model turns up with an office answer, and the office answer does not survive a chiller.
The practical work is usually unglamorous. Equipment specified for where it actually lives. Wi-fi that reaches into cold storage, where it normally does not. Scanners and label printers treated as production equipment rather than as accessories. Accounts that identify a person, so a record of who weighed, checked or signed is a record of something.
What tends to be missing
- A tested restore of the system holding batch and traceability records
- Coverage in the chiller, the freezer and the far end of despatch
- Named accounts instead of a shared login on the floor
- A current list of which supplier has remote access to what
- Any plan for the PC attached to the labeller or the checkweigher
- Retention long enough to still hold last year's production records
Scope
What we take responsibility for
Agreed in writing on day one in a Responsibility and Accountability Matrix, so the boundary between us, your production vendors and your food safety advisers is a document rather than an assumption.
The record, end to end
Microsoft 365 structured so documents and mail sit in one governed place, retention configured rather than remembered, and the platform behind your production or ERP system monitored and backed up, with restores tested by performing one.
The plant floor
Devices specified for where they live, coverage that reaches cold storage and despatch, scanners and label printers managed as production equipment, and production systems segmented away from the office network.
Who can reach what
Named accounts, multi-factor authentication, access that ends when a season or a contract does, and supplier remote access that is controlled and listed rather than permanent and forgotten. Aligned to SMB1001 through AgileSECURE.
Published pricing
AgileMANAGED: structured IT from $85 per user / month
We publish our pricing because a producer who costs a product to the cent deserves to know the number before the first meeting, not after the third.
AgileCORE
Remote support, monitoring, security baselines and Microsoft 365 management. Suits a business whose production systems are already in good order.
View AgileCORE →AgileCOMPLETE
Everything in CORE, plus onsite support, managed servers with 24/7 monitoring, and quarterly business reviews. The usual fit where production runs to a schedule.
View AgileCOMPLETE →Where we work
Based in Mornington, working across the southern production corridor
Agile IT Solutions has been based in Mornington since 2007. A number of the operations we look after sit along the industrial corridor through Carrum Downs, which is near enough that someone can be on your floor when the problem needs a person standing in front of it. Most issues are resolved remotely, and onsite support across our service area is included with AgileCOMPLETE.
If you would rather see how we work before talking about your own operation, our case studies set out what we actually did and what changed.
Questions
IT questions from food producers
Our traceability records are partly on paper. Is that a problem?
Not in itself, as long as the paper is complete and you can find it under pressure. The risk we see is the halfway state, where some of the chain is on paper in the plant, some is in a spreadsheet, and the join between them exists only in one person's head. Our part is the systems side: making sure what is digital is managed, retained, backed up and restorable. Whether to move the rest off paper is a decision for you and your food safety adviser, and we will give you a plain answer about what it would take.
Do you work with our production or ERP system?
We do not write it and we are not its consultant. We take responsibility for everything underneath it: the server or cloud platform, the database, the backups, the devices and network that reach it, and the vendor relationship when something needs escalating. When the fault sits in the application, we deal with that vendor rather than handing you back a ticket number.
Customers and auditors send us security questionnaires. Can you help with those?
Yes, and increasingly that is the reason a producer calls us. Larger customers now ask their suppliers about multi-factor authentication, backups, patching and who has access, and a vague answer is now a commercial problem. We give you the factual answers because we hold the evidence, and where a control is not in place we say so and put a date on it rather than wording around it.
What happens if our systems fail mid-production?
That gets decided before it happens, not during. We work out which systems production cannot run without, what the manual fallback is for each, and how long you can operate on it. Then the recovery path for those systems is built and tested to match, rather than being assumed from a backup report nobody has opened.
How secure does a food business actually need to be?
Secure enough that your records cannot be altered or lost by someone who should not have reached them, and that you could say so with evidence if a customer asked. In practice that means multi-factor authentication, named accounts, managed devices, segmentation between production and office systems, tested backups and monitoring. AgileSECURE delivers that aligned to the SMB1001 maturity framework, and our compliance obligations page sets out what applies to Victorian businesses.
How do we get started?
A discovery conversation, and for a producer that normally means walking the floor as well as looking at the office. We work out what you run on today, how it is managed and where the gaps are, then set out what a structured managed service would look like. No obligation and no quote pushed at you in the first meeting.