The story so far
Oyster Cloud is an Oyster Farm Management solution designed and developed as an easy to use tool that enables Oyster farmers, managers and business owners to Track Oyster stock and equipment, manage Work and grow there operations using insights from Oyster Clouds many reports.
Oyster Cloud has been under development for five years and we continue to provide regular innovative updates and improvements to the software. Most of these updates are driven by the ideas and feed back we recive from our Oyster Farmer user base. Oyster Clouds developer Matt Toan is very active and continues to visit and maintain a great working relationship with all our Farmers.
Matt has thirteen years experience working in the Oyster Industry. He loves Oystering and has a great passion for the industry.
While working at XL Oysters in Port Stephens Australia, a large family run and operated business. Matt saw first hand the short comings of whiteboard based stock management systems, the wasted time, frustration they can cause to a business and staff when things go wrong. The guys at XL recognized that if they wanted to expand and grow they needed a better tool, with this insight Oyster Cloud was born.
The original system developed for XL Oysters was very simple and had its limitations. Reports were limited, there was no historical batch tracking, leases could not be updated and added to by an end user this required modification to the database, the stock movement forms worked well on a desktop but were near impossible to use on a smart phone. These limitations meant the same old problems that plague whiteboard based systems showed up again. Matt learned a lot from this early experience and not willing to give up embarked upon Oyster Cloud’s first evolution.
The big challenge was designing a system that was easy to use and mobile. Many times when a staff member got back from the lease they would simply forget to input the stock movements. So with that Oyster Cloud went mobile, It was redeveloped from the ground up to be 100% mobile responsive. Now farmers could input there movements while out on the lease using there smart phones. This early design revelation has stayed a core design principle to Oyster Cloud’s on going development. Every new feature is designed mobile first, our users can access all the features, tools and reports the application has to offer from any device they wish.
This new approach gained interest from other farmers and government bodies such as Local Land Service Hunter region who saw the merit of such a system and how it could be of benefit to other Oyster Farmers. LLS put Matt in touch with a number of Oyster farms, this enabled further testing and refinement. Sadly Initial trials were unsuccessful, the system was still a bit buggy and not simple enough to use. This led to trial users becoming frustrated and abandoning the system, obviously a huge fail but undeterred and still believing in the project Matt, supported by XL Oysters, LLS and a number of the trial farms who also still believed in the concept forged ahead and made many improvements to Oyster Cloud based on the feedback and suggestions gained from this trial period.
The end result? An easy to use and fully responsive web application that is still actively used by all of the initial trial farmers and many more happy Oyster farmers across New South Wales Australia. Persistence and listening to Farmers are the two guiding principles that have ensured Oyster Clouds continued success and will always be adhered to moving forward.
Into the Future
We will continue to update and improve Oyster Cloud. In the first three months of 2019 we rolled out a massive update that improved and added to many of the reports and the batch tracking system. But were not done yet! We have a huge update coming to the scheduling system in April and many improvements and new features coming for the Lease Maps and a Landbase map. Further down the track this year we will be looking at implementing GPS functionality, IOT device integration and much more, watch this space!
